Ly Dinh, Ph.D

Assistant Professor of Information Science · University of South Florida
4202 E Fowler Avenue, CIS 2011 · Tampa, FL 33620-7800
lydinh@usf.edu

I am a computational social science researcher studying how research methods such as network analysis, social simulation models, and text analysis, can be used to advance our understanding of various social and organizational systems. My current projects place network science at the core to understand and explain a number of social and organizational phenomena ranging from egocentric networks to interagency emergency response networks. I also develop and tests new measure to capture the complexities of social interactions that can be observed at multiple levels of of the network (ego, dyad, triad, subgroup, whole network). My research has appeared in Communication Research, Scientific Reports, Communication Studies, and peer-reviewed outlets in computational social science. I am grateful to be a recipient of the 2020 Grace Hopper Scholar for Women in Computing, and a 2018 Network Science Fellow at Visible Networks Labs.

Research

Selected Publications:


Network Science

Aref, S.*, Dinh, L.*, Rezapour, R.*, & Diesner, J. (*Equal Contribution). Multilevel structural evaluation of signed directed social networks based on balance theory. Scientific Reports 10, 15228 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71838-6

Dinh, L.*, Rezapour, R.*, Jiang, L., & Diesner, J. (*Equal contribution). Assessing balance in signed digraphs using balance and transitivity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02565

Dinh, L., & Parulian, N. (2020). COVID-19 Pandemic and Information Diffusion Analysis on Twitter. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1), e252. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.25

Crisis Informatics

Dinh, L., Sarol, J., Jeoung, S., & Diesner, J. (2023). Are we projecting gender biases to ungendered things? Differences in referring to female versus male named hurricanes in 33 years of news coverage. Computational Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2023.1.006.DINH

Dinh, L., Kulkarni, S., Yang, P., & Diesner, J (2022). Reliability of Methods for Extracting Collaboration Networks from Crisis-related Situational Reports and Tweets. Proceedings of the ISCRAM Asia Pacific, 2022. Melbourne, Australia. Download PDF

Dinh, L., Yang, P., & Diesner, J. (2022). From plan to practice: Interorganizational response networks extraction from emergency management plans, situational reports, and tweets about hurricane events. Sunbelt 2022 International Network for Social Network Analysis.

Dinh, L., Akuka, I., & Diesner, J. (2021). Interorganizational collaboration networks during 2018 Hurricane Michael response. US Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence (COE) Summit. Fairfax, Virginia. Held online.

Sarol, J.*, Dinh, L.*, & Diesner, J. (*Equal contribution). Variation in Situational Awareness Information of Crisis Events due to Human Choices about Data Sources, Summarization Methods, and Algorithm Implementation. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2021. Atlanta, GA. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/18087

Organizational Communication

Barley, W. C., Dinh, L., Workman, H., & Fang, C. (2020). Exploring the Relationship Between Interdisciplinary Ties and Linguistic Familiarity Using Multilevel Network Analysis. Communication Research, 0093650220926001. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093650220926001

Pilny, A., Proulx, J. D., Dinh, L., & Bryan, A. L. (2017). An adapted structurational framework for the emergence of communication networks. Communication Studies, 68(1), 72-94. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10510974.2016.1262886

Scholarly Communication

Dinh, L., Sarol, J., Cheng, Y. Y., Hsiao, T. K., Parulian, N., & Schneider, J. (2019). Systematic examination of pre- and post-retraction citations. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 56(1), 390-394. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pra2.35

Ge, Y., Dinh, L., Liu, X., Su, J., Wang, A., & Diesner, J. (2021, June). BACO: A Background Knowledge- and Content-Based Framework for Citing Sentence Generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.116/

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Doctor of Philosophy
Information Science

GPA: 3.97

August 2016 - May 2022

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Master of Arts
Communication

GPA: 4.00

August 2014 - May 2016

University of Southern California

BACHELOR OF ARTS
Communication, Cinematic Arts & Entrepreneurship (double minors)

GPA: 3.92

August 2010 - May 2014

Teaching

Programming Languages & Tools
Classes

Interests

Apart from being an academic, I enjoy intellectual games such as escape rooms, word puzzles, and immersive theatrical experiences.

I am an experienced group fitness (LesMills) attendee, six years and going strong. I also enjoy spending quality time with my family either at the beach or somewhere adventurous.

Awards & Certifications

  • 2020 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing
  • 2018 Visible Networks Labs Fellow
  • Graduate Teacher Certificate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • 2 nd Place - Association for Library & Information Science Education (ALISE) Doctoral Poster Competition
  • 1 st Place - Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) Design Competition
  • 1 st Place - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's iSchool Research Showcase Poster Competition
  • 1 st Place - Marcia Israel Award for Best Feasibility Study in Entrepreneurship, University of Southern California
  • People's Choice - Image of Research Competition, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign