How Machine Learning Builds Meaning from Our Chats, Tweets, and Likes

There’s a small lab in Pennsylvania that may know your gender, age, and understands facets about your personality, whether you’re introverted or extroverted, for example…and it's using machine learning to help make conclusions from social media information. For those who are raising an eyebrow, know that they’re not tapping into people’s accounts without permission. The described study is happening at University of Pennsylvania and is led in part by Dr. Lyle Ungar. In this episode, we talk about the focus of his work - on finding patterns between users and their language on social media content, and building an understanding for how this information might help individuals and communities in the future.