aron culotta       
associate professor of computer science
director - center for community-engaged artificial intelligence
tulane university

cv   scholar   teaching   funding   awards   pubs


I investigate computational methods to discover socially-beneficial knowledge from text and social networks. Examples include tracking diseases, measuring effectiveness of public health campaigns, informing crisis response, preventing online harassment, detecting deceptive marketing, and identifying unsafe products.

The methods rely on machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis. Areas of technical contribution include domain adaptation, learning from label proportions, and causal inference. Please see my research statement for more details.

I also lead the Tulane Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence and the Jurist Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Are you a student interested in a phd or independent study?

teaching

natural language processing	intro to algorithms	intro to data science
artificial intelligence	online social network analysis	information retrieval
	service learning senior capstone

funding

This research is made possible in part by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jurist Center for Artificial Intelligence, the Newcomb Institute, Tulane's Office of Research, the Nayar Prize, the Educational and Research Initiative, and the Louisiana Board of Regents. I am grateful for this support.

awards

• nayar prize ii finalist
• outstanding paper honorable mention, aaai
• best paper honorable mention, cscw
• teacher of the year, cs department, illinois tech
• microsoft live labs fellow

publications

Predicting hurricane evacuation behavior synthesizing data from travel surveys and social media Tanmoy Bhowmik, Naveen Eluru, Samiul Hasan, Aron Culotta, Kamol Chandra Roy Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2024

Characterizing online criticism of partisan news media using weakly supervised learning Shivaram, Karthik, Bilgic, Mustafa, Shapiro, Matthew A, Culotta, Aron ICWSM, 2024 code

Forecasting political news engagement on social media Shivaram, Karthik, Bilgic, Mustafa, Shapiro, Matthew A, Culotta, Aron ICWSM, 2024 code

How Does Empowering Users with Greater System Control Affect News Filter Bubbles? Liu, Ping, Shivaram, Karthik, Culotta, Aron, Shapiro, Matthew A, Bilgic, Mustafa ICWSM, 2024 code

Use Open Source for Safer Generative AI Experiments Aron Culotta, Nicholas Mattei MIT Sloan Management Review, 2023

Domain Adaptation for Learning from Label Proportions Using Domain-Adversarial Neural Network Xintian Li, Aron Culotta SN Computer Science, 2023

Online Reviews Are Leading Indicators of Changes in K-12 School Attributes Linsen Li, Aron Culotta, Douglas N. Harris, Nicholas Mattei WWW, 2023

Forecasting COVID-19 Vaccination Rates using Social Media Data Xintian Li, Aron Culotta SocialNLP, 2023

Safety Reviews on Airbnb: An Information Tale Aron Culotta, Ginger Zhe Jin, Yidan Sun, Liad Wagman PlatStrat, 2022

Reducing Cross-Topic Political Homogenization in Content-Based News Recommendation Karthik Shivaram, Ping Liu, Matthew Shapiro, Mustafa Bilgic, Aron Culotta RecSys, 2022

Identifying Hurricane Evacuation Intent on Twitter Xintian Li, Samiul Hasan, Aron Culotta ICWSM, 2022

Leaders or Followers? A Temporal Analysis of Tweets from IRA Trolls Siva K Balasubramanian, Mustafa Bilgic, Aron Culotta, Libby Hemphill, Libby, Anita Nikolich, Matthew A Shapiro ICWSM, 2022

Enhancing Model Robustness and Fairness with Causality: A Regularization Approach Zhao Wang, Kai Shu, and Aron Culotta EMNLP WS, 2021

The Interaction between Political Typology and Filter Bubbles in News Recommendation Algorithms Ping Liu, Karthik Shivaram, Matthew Shapiro, Aron Culotta, Mustafa Bilgic WWW, 2021 code

Robustness to Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via Automatically Generated Counterfactuals Zhao Wang, Aron Culotta AAAI, 2021 code

Identifying Spurious Correlations for Robust Text Classification Zhao Wang, Aron Culotta EMNLP, 2020 code

Characterizing Variation in Toxic Language by Social Context Bahar Radfar, Karthik Shivaram, Aron Culotta ICWSM, 2020

Big data and emergency management: Concepts, methodologies, and applications Xuan Song, Haoran Zhang, Rajendra A. Akerkar, Huawei Huang, Song Guo, Lei Zhong, Yusheng Ji, Andreas Lothe Opdahl, Hemant Purohit, Andre Supkin, Akshay Pottathil, Aron Culotta IEEE BigData, 2020

When do words matter? Understanding the Impact of Lexical Choice on Audience Perception using Individual Treatment Effect Estimation Zhao Wang, Aron Culotta AAAI, 2019 code

Discovering and Controlling for Latent Confounds in Text Classification Using Adversarial Domain Adaptation Virgile Landeiro, Tuan Tran, Aron Culotta SDM, 2019

Using weak supervision to scale the development of machine-learning models for social media-based marketing research Jennifer Cutler, Aron Culotta Applied Marketing Analytics, 2019

Collecting Representative Samples from a Search Engine by Adaptive Query Generation Virgile Landeiro, Aron Culotta ASONAM, 2019

Estimating Tie Strength in Follower Networks to Measure Brand Perceptions Tung Nguyen, Li Zhang, Aron Culotta FAB, 2019

Personality and Behavior in Role-based Online Games Zhao Wang, Anna Sapienza, Aron Culotta, Emilio Ferrara COG, 2019

Robust Text Classification under Confounding Shift Virgile Landeiro, Aron Culotta JAIR, 2018 code

Forecasting the presence and intensity of hostility on Instagram using linguistic and social features Ping Liu, Joshua Guberman, Libby Hemphill, Aron Culotta ICWSM, 2018 code

Learning from noisy label proportions for classifying online social data Ehsan Mohammady Ardehaly, Aron Culotta SNAM, 2018

Mining the Demographics of Political Sentiment from Twitter Using Learning from Label Proportions Ehsan Ardehaly, Aron Culotta ICDM, 2017

Co-training for Demographic Classification Using Deep Learning from Label Proportions Ehsan Ardehaly, Aron Culotta ICDM-WS, 2017

Are Words Commensurate with Actions? Quantifying Commitment to a Cause from Online Public Messaging Zhao Wang, Jennifer Cutler, Aron Culotta ICDM-WS, 2017 code

Controlling for Unobserved Confounds in Classification Using Correlational Constraints Virgile Landeiro, Aron Culotta ICWSM, 2017 code

Identifying leading indicators of product recalls from online reviews using positive unlabeled learning and domain adaptation Shreesh Kumara Bhat, Aron Culotta ICWSM, 2017 code

Using online social networks to measure consumers’ brand perception Jennifer Cutler, Aron Culotta Applied Marketing Analytics, 2017

Towards identifying leading indicators of smoking cessation attempts from social media Aron Culotta ICHI-WS, 2016

Polar Scores: Measuring Partisanship Using Social Media Content Libby Hemphill, Aron Culotta, Matthew Heston Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2016 code

Cold-start recommendations for audio news stories using matrix factorization Ehsan Mohammady Ardehaly, Aron Culotta IJCAI, 2016

Domain adaptation for learning from label proportions using self-training Ehsan Mohammady Ardehaly, Aron Culotta IJCAI, 2016

Training a text classifier with a single word using Twitter Lists and domain adaptation Aron Culotta SNAM, 2016

Reducing confounding bias in observational studies that use text classification Virgile Landeiro, Aron Culotta AAAI Symposium, 2016

Predicting Twitter User Demographics using Distant Supervision from Website Traffic Data Aron Culotta, Nirmal Kumar Ravi, Jennifer Cutler JAIR, 2016 code

Mining brand perceptions from Twitter social networks Aron Culotta, Jennifer Cutler Marketing Science, 2016 code

Robust text classification in the presence of confounding variables Virgile Landeiro, Aron Culotta AAAI, 2016 code

Finding truth in cause-related advertising: A lexical analysis of brands' health, environment, and social justice communications on Twitter Aron Culotta, Jennifer Cutler, Junzhe Zheng The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 2015

A demographic and sentiment analysis of e-cigarette messages on Twitter Elaine Cristina Resende, Aron Culotta BCB-WS, 2015 code

Inferring latent attributes of Twitter users with label regularization Ehsan Mohammady Ardehaly, Aron Culotta HLT/NAACL, 2015

Using Matched Samples to Estimate the Effects of Exercise on Mental Health from Twitter Virgile Landeiro Dos Reis, Aron Culotta AAAI, 2015 code

Predicting the Demographics of Twitter Users from Website Traffic Data Aron Culotta, Nirmal Ravi Kumar, Jennifer Cutler AAAI, 2015 code

Reducing Sampling Bias in Social Media Data for County Health Inference Aron Culotta JSM, 2014 code

Anytime Active Learning Maria E Ramirez-Loaiza, Aron Culotta, Mustafa Bilgic AAAI, 2014

Using county demographics to infer attributes of Twitter users Ehsan Mohammady, Aron Culotta ACL-WS, 2014

Tweedr: Mining Twitter to Inform Disaster Response Zahra Ashktorab, Christopher Brown, Manojit Nandi, Aron Culotta ISCRAM, 2014 code

Estimating County Health Statistics with Twitter Aron Culotta CHI, 2014 code

Inferring the origin location of tweets with quantitative confidence Reid Priedhorsky, Aron Culotta, Sara Y. Del Valle CSCW, 2014 code

Lightweight methods to estimate influenza rates and alcohol sales volume from Twitter messages Aron Culotta LREC, 2013

Framing in Social Media: How the US Congress Uses Twitter Hashtags to Frame Political Issues Libby Hemphill, Aron Culotta, Matthew Heston Tech Report, 2013 code

Towards Anytime Active Learning: Interrupting Experts to Reduce Annotation Costs Maria E. Ramirez-Loaiza, Aron Culotta, Mustafa Bilgic KDD-WS, 2013

Too Neurotic, Not too Friendly: Structured Personality Classification on Textual Data Francisco Iacobelli, Aron Culotta ICWSM-WS, 2013

A demographic analysis of online sentiment during Hurricane Irene Benjamin Mandel, Aron Culotta, John Boulahanis, Danielle Stark, Bonnie Lewis, Jeremy Rodrigue NAACL/HLT-WS, 2012

SampleRank: Training factor graphs with atomic gradients Michael Wick, Khashayar Rohanimanesh, Kedar Bellare, Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum ICML, 2011

Detecting influenza epidemics by analyzing Twitter messages Aron Culotta Tech Report, 2010

Towards detecting influenza epidemics by analyzing Twitter messages Aron Culotta KDD-WS, 2010

SampleRank: Learning preferences from atomic gradients Michael Wick, Khashayar Rohanimanesh, Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum NIPS-WS, 2009

An entity-based model for coreference resolution Michael Wick, Aron Culotta, Khashayar Rohanimanesh, Andrew McCallum SDM, 2009

Learning and inference in weighted logic with application to natural language processing Aron Culotta PhD Thesis, 2008

Canonicalization of Database Records using Adaptive Similarity Measures Aron Culotta, Michael Wick, Robert Hall, Matthew Marzilli, Andrew McCallum KDD, 2007

Sparse Message Passing Algorithms for Weighted Maximum Satisfiability Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum, Bart Selman, Ashish Sabharwal NESCAI, 2007

Author Disambiguation using Error-driven Machine Learning with a Ranking Loss Function Aron Culotta, Pallika Kanani, Robert Hall, Michael Wick, Andrew McCallum IIWeb, 2007

First-Order Probabilistic Models for Coreference Resolution Aron Culotta, Michael Wick, Robert Hall, Andrew McCallum HLT/NAACL, 2007

Corrective Feedback and Persistent Learning for Information Extraction Aron Culotta, Trausti Kristjansson, Andrew McCallum, Paul Viola Artificial Intelligence, 2006

Tractable Learning and Inference with High-Order Representations Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum ICML-WS, 2006

Learning field compatibilities to extract database records from unstructured text Michael Wick, Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum EMNLP, 2006

Practical Markov logic containing first-order quantifiers with application to identity uncertainty Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum HLT/NAACL, 2006

Integrating probabilistic extraction models and data mining to discover relations and patterns in text Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum, Jonathan Betz HLT/NAACL, 2006

Learning clusterwise similarity with first-order features Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum NIPS-WS, 2005

A conditional model of deduplication for multi-type relational data Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum Tech Report, 2005

Joint deduplication of multiple record types in relational data Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum CIKM, 2005

Reducing labeling effort for structured prediction tasks Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum AAAI, 2005

Gene prediction with conditional random fields Aron Culotta, David Kulp, Andrew McCallum Tech Report, 2005

Dependency tree kernels for relation extraction Aron Culotta, Jeffery Sorensen ACL, 2004

Interactive information extraction with constrained conditional random fields Trausti Kristjannson, Aron Culotta, Paul Viola, Andrew McCallum AAAI, 2004

Confidence estimation for information extraction Aron Culotta, Andrew McCallum HLT, 2004

Extracting social networks and contact information from email and the Web Aron Culotta, Ron Bekkerman, Andrew McCallum CEAS, 2004

Maximizing cascades in social networks Aron Culotta Tech Report, 2003