Yu-Ru Lin

Yu-Ru Lin is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh, and serves as Research & Academic Director at the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security (Pitt Cyber). With secondary appointments in Political Science, Computer Science, and the Intelligent Systems Program, their interdisciplinary work bridges computational methods with social science inquiry.

Research interests focus on:

• Social and political network analysis
• Computational social science
• Data mining and visualization
• Digital accountability in political communication
• Policy diffusion analytics
• Trust-distrust dynamics in networked societies

Key research themes include:

• Developing network theories for misinformation and extremism
• Designing visual analytics for policy diffusion and group bias detection
• Studying collective behavior during emergencies
• Creating computational tools for social data analysis

Major grants include NSF awards for:

• Public policy diffusion analytics
• COVID-19 misinformation mitigation
• Urban mobility and smart city initiatives
• Understanding extremism in cyber-social spaces

Scientific leadership roles:

• Editor-in-Chief of ICWSM
• Editorial board member at Frontiers in Big Data, EPJ Data Science, PLOS ONE, and Nature Scientific Reports
• Co-chair roles at KDD Humanitarian Mapping Workshop, WWW Web & Society Track, and multiple SBP-BRiMS graduate programs

As founder of the Pitt Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB), they lead research on social media analysis, network modeling, and urban informatics through projects like PittSmartLiving – a $1.4M NSF-funded initiative exploring real-time transit incentives and community engagement.