Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Institute of Sustainable Transportation and Logistics
SUNY at Buffalo
306 Davis Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-1589
Email: wendong at buffalo dot edu
Fall 2014 office hours
Wednesday 3:00pm - 5:00pm
I am actively recruiting PhD students
Wen Dong focuses on modeling human interaction dynamics with stochastic process theory through combining the power of “big data” and the logic/reasoning power of state-of-the-art agent-based models, to solve our societies most challenging problems such as transportation sustainability and efficiency.
His approach is to drive “simulation games” (alike SimCity) with petabyte-sized “data exhaust trails” of networked people to study our social systems and make decisions through playing the data-driven simulation games on super-computers (which solve the stochastic differential equations that describe the agent behavior).
He has applied this approach to social systems of different sizes, ranging from the movement of millions of vehicle locations sampled every minute for years, the co-evolution of social network and individual behavior of different communities tracked by personal mobile phones and surveys, and Bales’ interaction process analysis of several individuals solving problems tracked by socio-metric badges. The applications have won both industrial and academic awards.
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Functional Roles: Dynamics in Small Group Interactions. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2013
Wei Pan, Wen Dong, Manuel Cebrian, Taemie Kim, James Fowler, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Dynamical Influence in Human Interaction: Using Data to Make Better Inferences. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2012, 29(2): 77-86
Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Modeling Influence between Experts. Artificial Intelligence for Human Computing (LNAI 4451/2007), 2007:170-189
Wen Dong, Katherine Heller, and Alex Pentland. Graph-Coupled HMMs for Modeling the Spread of Infection. In Proceedings of 28th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. Catalina Island, CA, USA, 2012: 227-236
Wen Dong, Katherine Heller, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Infection with Multi-agent Dynamics. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction. D.C., USA, 2012: 172-179 (best paper award)
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, and Alex Pentland. Modeling the Co-evolution of Behaviors and Social Relationships Using Mobile Phone Data. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. Beijing, China, 2011:134-143. Invited and extended work in Tsinghua Science and Technology 2012, 17(2): 136-151
Wen Dong, Daniel Olguin-Olguin, Ben Waber, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Organizational Dynamics from Sensor Network Data. In Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks. London, U.K., 2012: 130-135
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, and Alex Pentland. Automatic Prediction of Small Group Performance in Information Sharing Tasks. In Proceedings of Collective Intelligence. Boston, MA, USA, 2012
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Taemie Kim, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Conversational Dynamics and Performance in a Social Dilemma Task. In Proceedings of 5th International Symposium on Communications, Control, and Signal Processing, Rome, Italy, 2012
Bruno Lepri, Wen Dong, Fabio Pianesi, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Individuals and Groups in Face-to- Face Interactions. In NIPS 2010 Workshop – Human Communication Dynamics
Wei Pan, Manuel Cebrian, Wen Dong, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. Modeling Dynamical Influence in Human Interaction Patterns. In NIPS 2010 Workshop – Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds
Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Quantifying Group Problem Solving Using Social Signal Analysis. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces. Beijing, China, 2010:40-43
Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. A Network Analysis of Road Traffic with Vehicle Tracking Data. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Human Behavior Modeling. Palo Alto, California, USA, 2009
Wen Dong, Taemie Kim, and Alex Pentland. A Quantitative Analysis of Collective Creativity in Playing 20-Questions Games. In Proceedings of ACM C&C, 2009
Wen Dong, Bruno Lepri, Alessandro Cappelletti, Alex Pentland, Fabio Pianesi, and Massimo Zancanaro. Using the Influence Model to Recognize Functional Roles in Meeting. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces. Nagoya, Japan, 2007:271-278
Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Influence Modeling and Network Discovery. NetSci, 2007
Wen Dong and Alex Pentland. Multi-sensor Data Fusion Using the Influence Model. In Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks. Boston, MA, USA, 2006: 72-75
Challenge Problem Co-chair: Grand data challenge of 2013 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2013 challenge) based on MIT Reality Commons data set. Grand data challenge of 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2014 challenge) based on Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone
Program Committee member: The 2013 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2013), The 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2014), First Workshop on Mobile and Online Social Networks (MOSN 2011), International Workshop on Social Behavioral Analysis and Behavioral Change (SBABC11)
Reviewer: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics, IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
Ph.D. Media Arts and Sciences, M.I.T. 2010
Dissertation: “Modeling the Structure of Collective Intelligence”
Committee: Alex Pentland (advisor), David Lazer, and Henry Lieberman
M.S. Media Arts and Sciences, M.I.T. 2006
Thesis: “Infuence Modeling of Complex Stochastic Processes”
Committee: Alex Pentland (advisor), Joe Paradiso, and V. Michael Bove Jr.
M.S. Computer Science, University of San Francisco 2004