Ahana Biswas

ABOUT ME

I’m a second-year Information Science PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh working with Prof. Yu-Ru Lin. I am primarily interested in studying how individuals interact and behave in digital spaces. My research centers on understanding what captures people’s attention online, how information spreads, and how communities form and evolve within cyber-social spaces, as well as the impact of network structures on social behaviors and dynamics. I explore these topics using computational methods and NLP tools to analyze large-scale datasets from various online platforms such as Twitter and FB. Through my work, I aim to uncover insights into how individuals engage in digital communities and how these interactions shape our online world.

Please feel free to reach out!

Research Interests

Computational Social Science, Social Media, Network Analysis

News

• [Jul 2024] Our paper titled ‘Political Elites in the Attention Economy: Visibility Over Civility and Credibility?’ has been accepted to ICWSM 2025!
• [Mar 2024] Participated in SCI 3MT Competition, Pitt (Won People’s Choice Award!)
• [Mar 2024] Passed my Preliminary exams!
• [Nov 2023] Gave a talk at DINS PhD Seminar, University of Pittsburgh
• [Sep 2023] Presented my work on Chinese propaganda at SBP-BRiMS (slides)

Publications

• Biswas, A., Lin, YR., Tai, YC., Desmarais BA. Political Elites in the Attention Economy: Visibility Over Civility and Credibility? Accepted in ICWSM 2025. DOI
• Biswas, A., Niven, T., Lin, YR. Political Narratives During the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (SBP-BRiMS) 2023. DOI