Publications

Political context of the European vaccine debate on Twitter

Giordano Paoletti, Lorenzo Dall'Amico, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Jacopo Lenti, Yelena Mejova, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Starnini, Michele Tizzani

@ Scientific Reports https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54863-7

Towards a global impact-based forecasting model for tropical cyclones

Mersedeh Kooshki Forooshani, Marc van den Homberg, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Yelena Mejova, Leonardo Milano, Pauline Ndirangu, Daniela Paolotti, Aklilu Teklesadik, and Monica Turner

@ Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Journal: Reducing the impacts of natural hazards through forecast-based action: from early warning to early action  https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-309-2024

Gender in the Disclosure of Loneliness on Twitter during COVID-19 Lockdowns

Yelena Mejova, Anna Hommadova Lu

@ Frontiers in Digital Health-Digital Mental Health https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2023.1297983

Self-Disclosure of Loneliness by LGBTQ+ Twitter Users during COVID-19

Yelena Mejova, Anna Hommadova Lu

@ Journal of Homosexuality  doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2023.2263801

Impact of Food-related Conflicts on Self-reported Food Insecurity

Stefania Fiandrino, Caitriona Dowd, Giulia Martini, Yelena Mejova, Elisa Omodei, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Tizzani

@ Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, section Land, Livelihoods and Food Security  https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1239992

Leave no Place Behind: Improved Geolocation in Humanitarian Documents

Enrico Belliardo, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova

@ ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT)

Best Paper Award

Global Misinformation Spillovers in the Vaccination Debate Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Multilingual Twitter Study

Jacopo Lenti, Yelena Mejova, Kyriaki Kalimeri, André Panisson, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Tizzani, Michele Starnini

@ JMIR Infodemiology  https://doi.org/10.2196/44714

The Thin Ideology of Populist Advertising on Facebook during the 2019 EU Elections

Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, Andre Panisson

@ The Web Conference (WebConf)  doi.acm.org?doi=3543507.3583267

Digital Epidemiology (Chapter)

Yelena Mejova

@ Handbook of Computational Social Science for Policy. Springer  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16624-2_15

Comfort Foods and Community Connectedness: Investigating Diet Change during COVID-19 using YouTube Videos on Twitter

Yelena Mejova, Lydia Manikonda

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Authority without Care: Moral Values behind the Mask Mandate Response

Yelena Mejova, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in developing countries through Facebook advertising data

Simone Piaggesi, Serena Giurgola, Márton Karsai, Yelena Mejova, André Panisson and Michele Tizzoni

@ Frontiers on Big Data, Sec. Data Analytics for Social Impact  https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2022.1006352

I Feel You: Mixed-methods Study of Social Support of Loneliness on Twitter

Yelena Mejova, Anna Hommadova Lu

@ Computers in Human Behavior  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107389

Behavior Change around an Online Health Awareness Campaign: a Causal Impact Study

Victor Suarez Lledo, Yelena Mejova

@ Frontiers Public Health  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.857531

Modeling Political Activism around Gun Debate via Social Media

Yelena Mejova, Jisun An, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Haewoon Kwak

@ ACM Transactions on Social Computing. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532102 

Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate

Giuseppe Crupi, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzani, Daniela Paolotti, Andre Panisson

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

All the lonely people: Effects of social isolation on self-disclosure of loneliness on Twitter

Anna Hommadova Lu, Yelena Mejova

@ New Media & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099900

Googling for Abortion: Search Engine Mediation of Abortion Accessibility in the United States

Yelena Mejova, Tatiana Gracyk, Ronald Robertson

@ Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2(2022), 1-41

Perceptions of FIFA Men’s World Cup 2022 Host Nation Qatar in the Twittersphere

Susan Dun, Hatim Rachdi, Shahan Ali Memon, Rohith Krishnan Pillai, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber

@ International Journal of Sport Communication. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsc.2022-0041

YouTubing at Home: Media Sharing Behavior Change as Proxy for Mobility Around COVID-19 Lockdowns

Yelena Mejova, Nicolas Kourtellis

@ Web Science Conference (WebSci)

Detecting adherence to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule from user-generated content in a US parenting forum 

Lorenzo Betti, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Laetitia Gauvin, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Starnini

@ PLOS Computational Biology

On the interplay between educational attainment and nutrition: a spatially-aware perspective

Narges Azizi Fard, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Rossano Schifanella

@ EPJ Data Science

Developing Annotated Resources for Internal Displacement Monitoring

Fabio Poletto, Yunbai Zhang, André Panisson, Yelena Mejova, Daniela Paolotti and Sylvain Ponserre

@ Workshop Data Science for Social Good at the Web Conference (WebConf)

Clandestino or Rifugiato? Anti-immigration Facebook Ad Targeting in Italy 

Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, Andre Panisson and Daniela Paolotti 

@ ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

Best Paper Award

Facebook Ads: Politics of Migration in Italy

Arthur Capozzi, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Yelena Mejova, Corrado Monti, Andre Panisson and Daniela Paolotti 

@ International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo)

Best Paper Runner-Up

Impact of Online Health Awareness Campaign: Case of National Eating Disorders Association

Yelena Mejova, Víctor Suarez-Lledó

 @ International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo)

Best Paper Nominee

COVID-19 on Facebook Ads: Competing Agendas around a Public Health Crisis

Yelena Mejova, Kyriaki Kalimeri

@ ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS)

Falling into the Echo Chamber: the Italian Vaccination Debate on Twitter

Alessandro Cossard, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Yelena Mejova, Daniela Paolotti, Michele Starnini

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Daniele Rama, Yelena Mejova, Michele Tizzoni, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Ingmar Weber

@ The Web Conference (WebConf)

@ Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) Best Session Poster Award

Nation Branding via Sports Mega Events Hosting in the 2022 FIFA World Cup

Susan Dun, Achira Bhattacharyya, H. Rachdi, Ingmar Weber, Yelena Mejova, Shahan Ali Memon, Rohith Krishnan Pillai, N. Das

@ National Communication Association (NCA) 105th Annual Convention

Urban-Rural Inequalities through Facebook Ads

Daniele Rama, Michele Tizzoni, Kyriaki Kalimeri, Daniela Paolotti, Yelena Mejova

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Mapping the Anti-Vaccination Debate in Italy

Alessandro Cossard, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Daniela Paolotti, Yelena Mejova

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Modeling Gun Culture in United States: Demographics, Networks, Ideologies

 Jisun An, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Haewoon Kwak, Yelena Mejova

 @ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Effect of Values and Technology Use on Exercise: Implications for Personalized Behavior Change Interventions

Yelena Mejova, Kyriaki Kalimeri 

@ ACM Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP)

also @ International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-PRICAI)

Best Paper Award

Visualizing Geo-Demographic Urban Data

Matheus Araujo, Yelena Mejova, Michael Aupetit, Ingmar Weber 

@ ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) (demo)

Fake Cures: User-centric Modeling of Health Misinformation in Social Media

Amira Ghenai, Yelena Mejova 

@ ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

Measuring Subnational Digital Gender Inequality in India through Gender Gaps in Facebook Use

Yelena Mejova, Harsh Rajiv Gandhi, Tejas Jivanbhai Rafaliya, Mayank Rameshbhai Sitapara, Ridhi Kashyap, Ingmar Weber 

@ Conference on Computing & Sustainable Societies (COMPASS)

Information Sources and Needs in the Obesity and Diabetes Twitter Discourse

Yelena Mejova 

@ ACM International Conference on Digital Health (DH)

Online Health Monitoring using Facebook Advertisement Audience Estimates in the United States: Evaluation Study

Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber, Luis Fernandez-Luque 

@ JMIR Public Health and Surveillance 4 (1), e30

Privacy and Social Media Use in the Arabian Gulf: Saudi Arabian & Qatari Traditional Values in the Digital World

Norah Abokhodair, Sofiane Abbar, Sarah Vieweg, Yelena Mejova 

@ The Journal of Web Science 3 (1) 

#Halal Culture on Instagram

Yelena Mejova, Youcef Benkhedda, Khairani 

@ Frontiers in Digital Humanities: Big Data, 02

Seminar Users in the Arab Twitter Sphere 

Kareem Darwish, Dimitar Alexandrov, Preslav Nakov, Yelena Mejova 

@ Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo)

Catching Zika Fever: Application of Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning for Tracking Health Misinformation on Twitter

Amira Ghenai, Yelena Mejova 

@ International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)

Public Perception of a Country: Exploring Tweets About Qatar

Shahan Ali Memon, Rohith Krishnan Pillai, Susan Dun, Yelena Mejova and Ingmar Weber 

@ ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci)

Using Facebook Ads Audiences for Global Lifestyle Disease Surveillance: Promises and Limitations

Matheus Araújo, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber, Fabricio Benevenuto 

@ ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci)

also @ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

The Audience in Twitter Communication 

George Boynton, Sikder Huq, Yelena Mejova 

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Implementing the 360° quantified self for childhood obesity: a feasibility study and experiences from a weight loss camp in Qatar

Meghna Singh, Luis Fernandez-Luque, Ferda Ofli, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber, Michael Aupetit, Sahar Jreige, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Jaideep Srivastava, Mohamed Ahmedna 

@ BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Bumps and Bruises: Mining Presidential Campaign Announcements on Twitter

Huyen Le, Bob Boynton, Yelena Mejova, Zubair Shafiq and Padmini Srinivasan 

@ ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT)

Visualizing Health Awareness in the Middle East

Matheus Araújo, Yelena Mejova, Michael Aupetit and Ingmar Weber 

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Kissing Cuisines: Exploring Worldwide Culinary Habits on the Web

Sina Sajadmanesh, Sina Jafarzadeh, Seyed Ali Ossia, Hamid R. Rabiee, Hamed Haddadi, Yelena Mejova, Mirco Musolesi, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini 

@ World Wide Web (WWW) Companion

Revisiting The American Voter on Twitter

Huyen TT Le, GR Boynton, Yelena Mejova, Zubair M Shafiq, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Human Computer Interaction (CHI)

What Campaigns Become as Social Media Become the Infrastructure of Political Communication

GR Boynton, Huyen TT Le, Yelena Mejova, Zubair M Shafiq, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Social Media and Politics. Vol 1, p. 21

Influence in Food Consumption: Will You Eat Ice Cream When it Rains?  

Yelena Mejova, Sofiane Abbar and Ingmar Weber 

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Twitter and the Iowa Caucus  

Bob Boynton, Yelena Mejova and Zubair Shafiq 

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2)

Beyond Entities: Promoting Explorative Search with Bundles

Ilaria Bordino, Mounia Lalmas, Yelena Mejova, Olivier Van Laere 

@ Information Retrieval Journal (INRT)

Privacy and Twitter in Qatar: Traditional Values in the Digital World

Norah Abokhodair, Sofiane Abbar, Sarah Vieweg, Yelena Mejova 

@ Web Science Conference (WebSci)

Fetishizing Food in Digital Age: #foodporn Around the World

Yelena Mejova, Sofiane Abbar, Hamed Haddadi 

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Are you Charlie or Ahmed? Cultural pluralism in Charlie Hebdo response on Twitter

Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Yelena Mejova, Sonia Alonso Saenz De Oger, Braulio Gomez Fortes 

@ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

Crowdsourcing Health Labels: Inferring Body Weight from Profile Pictures

Ingmar Weber, Yelena Mejova 

@ ACM International Conference on Digital Health (DH)

360 Quantified Self

Hamed Haddadi, Ferda Ofli, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber, Jaideep Srivastava 

@ International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)

Dietary Habits of an Expat Nation: Case of Qatar

Yelena Mejova, Hamed Haddadi, Sofiane Abbar, Azadeh Ghahghaei, Ingmar Weber 

@ International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)

Language Plurality in Twitter Political Speech

Yelena Mejova and Bob Boynton 

@ International Conference on Computational Social Science (ICCSS)

#FoodPorn: Obesity Patterns in Culinary Interactions 

Yelena Mejova, Hamed Haddadi, Anastasios Noulas, Ingmar Weber 

@ ACM International Conference on Digital Health (DH)

Bridges into the Unknown: Personalizing Connections to Little-known Countries

Yelena Mejova, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Ingmar Weber 

@ Human Computer Interaction (CHI)

You Tweet What You Eat: Studying Food Consumption Through Twitter

Sofiane Abbar, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber 

@ Human Computer Interaction (CHI)

also @ International Conference on Computational Social Science (ICCSS)

Controversy and Sentiment in Online News

Yelena Mejova, Amy X. Zhang, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Carlos Castillo 

@ Computation+Journalism Symposium (CJ) (poster)

Driving Curiosity in Search with Large-scale Entity Networks

Ilaria Bordino, Mounia Lalmas, Yelena Mejova, Olivier Van Laere 

@ ACM SIGWEB Newsletter (SIGWEB)

DEESSE: entity-Driven Exploratory and sErendipitous Search SystEm 

Olivier Van Laere, Ilaria Bordino, Yelena Mejova, Mounia Lalmas 

@ ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) (demo)

Twitter ain't Without Frontiers: Economic, Social, and Cultural Boundaries in International Communication

Ruth Garcia-Gavilanes, Yelena Mejova, Daniele Quercia 

@ ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

Giving is Caring: Understanding Donation Behavior through Email

Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber, GVR Kiran, Michael C Dougal 

@ ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)

Penguins in Sweaters, or Serendipitous Entity Search on User-generated Content

Ilaria Bordino, Yelena Mejova, Mounia Lalmas 

@ ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)

Best Paper Award

Searching for Interestingness in Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers

Yelena Mejova, Ilaria Bordino, Mounia Lalmas, Aristides Gionis 

@ International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (poster paper)

The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows

Bogdan State, Patrick Park, Ingmar Weber, Yelena Mejova, Michael Macy 

@ Computing Research Repository (CoRR)

Detecting Friday Night Party Photos: Semantics for Tag Recommendation

Philip McParlane, Yelena Mejova, Ingmar Weber 

@ European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) (short paper)

GOP Primary Season on Twitter: "Popular" Political Sentiment in Social Media

Yelena Mejova, Padmini Srinivasan, Bob Boynton 

@ International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)

Political Speech in Social Media Streams: YouTube Comments and Twitter Posts

Yelena Mejova, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Web Science Conference (WebSci) (poster)

Crossing Media Streams with Sentiment: Domain Adaptation in Blogs, Reviews and Twitter

Yelena Mejova, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

The University of Iowa at TREC 2011: Microblogs, Medical Records and Crowdsourcing

Sanmitra Bhattacharya, Christopher G. Harris, Yelena Mejova, Chao Yang, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ The twentieth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

Exploring Feature Definition and Selection for Sentiment Classifiers

Yelena Mejova, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) (poster)

Reuse in the Wild: an Empirical and Ethnographic Study of Organizational Content Reuse

Yelena Mejova, Klaar De Schepper, Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu

@ Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI) 

Honorable Mention Award

Tapping into Sociological Lexicons for Sentiment Polarity Classification

Yelena Mejova 

@ Young Scientist Conference in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR)

News Event Modeling and Tracking in the Social Web with Ontological Guidance

Viet Ha-Thuc, Yelena Mejova, Christopher Harris, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC)

TREC Blog and TREC Chem: A View from the Corn Fields

Yelena Mejova, Viet Ha-Thuc, Steven Foster, Christopher Harris, Bob Arens, Padmini Srinivasan

@ The eighteenth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

A Relevance-based Topic Model for News Event Tracking

Viet Ha-Thuc, Yelena Mejova, Christopher Harris, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval Conference (SIGIR) (poster)

Event Intensity Tracking in Weblog Collections 

Viet Ha-Thuc, Yelena Mejova, Christopher Harris, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Dataset Workshop, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)

University of Iowa at TREC 2008 Legal and Relevance Feedback Tracks

Brian Almquist, Yelena Mejova, Viet Ha-Thuc, Padmini Srinivasan 

@ Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

PhD in Computer Science @ University of Iowa 

Thesis: Sentiment Analysis Within and Across Social Media Streams

Presidential Fellow

Graduate Certificate in College Teaching

BS in Computer Science @ Minnesota State University Moorhead