Overview
I am a third year Ph.D. student at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. Prior to joining the iSchool, I completed my Bachelors in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Statistics from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and my Masters in Computer Science from University of Southern California, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence ,machine learning and social network analysis.
Even though my background is in the core computational sciences, it was my childhood dream to study and understand human actions, relationships and how these affect and manifest in society. I always had a penchant for the arts and the humanities and thus wanted to acquire knowledge in areas more aligned with social sciences which also complement my technical training and background. Particularly, online social networks had always captivated me as these today are reshaping social, cultural and political infrastructure and practices. Hence, this passion of my led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Information Studies at the iSchool.
Research
Broadly, I am interested in the areas of HCI and CSCW. Further, I am interested in the topics of computer-mediated communication, virtual communities, social network analysis, and applications of machine learning. The overarching theme of my work is to understand the role of online discussion channels for academic mentoring and support.
Selected Publications
- Sengupta, S., & Haythornthwaite, C. (2020, January). Learning with comments: An analysis of comments and community on Stack Overflow. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
- Sengupta, S. (2019, November). What are Academic Subreddits Talking About? A Comparative Analysis of r/academia and r/gradschool. In Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 357-361).
- Johnson, I. L., Sengupta, S., Schöning, J., & Hecht, B. (2016, May). The geography and importance of localness in geotagged social media. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 515-526).
… and more posters, work in progress (WIP), workshop papers and short articles. Full details are in my CV (available upon request).
Personal
I like playing the piano, singing, reading, creative writing and swimming.
I love watching historical dramas and documentaries. I also read a lot of books on historical topics, particularly those on erstwhile royal dynasties of Europe.
I love exploring new cultures, languages and historical developments. Particularly, I have been keen to know more about East Asian cultures, watching several Korean dramas and Japanese anime has further fueled my interest to explore this part of the world more intricately!
