Colloquium Series: Lexing Xie

Our upcoming event for the Statistics Department Colloquium Series is scheduled for Monday, November 11 from 12:00 – 1:00pm (ET) and will be an in-person presentation Science Center Rm. 316. Lunch will be provided to guests following the talk. This week's speaker will be Lexing Xie of the Computer Science Department at Australian National University. 

Online Attention: Processes, Graphs, and Online Optimization
What makes a video popular? What drives collective attention online? What are the similarities and differences between clicks and transactions in a market? This talk aims to address these three questions. First, I will discuss a physics-inspired stochastic time series model that explains and forecasts the seemingly unpredictable patterns of viewership over time. This model provides novel metrics for predicting expected popularity gains per share and assessing sensitivity to promotions. Next, I will describe new measurement studies and machine learning models that analyze how networks of online items influence each other’s attention. Finally, I will introduce a macroscopic view of attention, offering mathematical descriptions of market equilibriums and distributed optimization. Our ongoing work seek computational descriptions of attention markets that can inform potential mechanisms for a healthier online ecosystem. Additionally, my group works on visualising intellectual influence and decision-making in daily moral dilemmas, which opens up new questions on individual and collective attention.

Lexing Xie is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU), where she leads the ANU Computational Media Lab and directs the ANU-wide Integrated AI Network. Her research spans machine learning, computational social science, and computational economics, with a particular focus on online optimization, neural networks for sequences and networks, and applied problems such as distributed online markets, decision-making by humans and machines. Lexing received the 2023 ARC Future Fellowship and the 2018 Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research. Her research has garnered seven best paper and best student paper awards at ACM and IEEE conferences between 2002 and 2019. Among her editorial roles, she served as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and is the Program Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2024. Prior to joining ANU, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University.