Tonight we have two guest lecturers, John Kelly and Gilad Lotan, both lead scientists at NYC start-ups which focus on the social network space. It will be interesting to see how the two play off of each other, as they’re friends! The bios are below.

We’ll spend the last 45 minutes or so in a class discussion about data journalism and the written portion of the final project. Come prepared to report on your progress so far, and discuss your goals going forward. We’ll have data journalist Jon Bruner, there to contribute to the discussion.

Here are the speaker bios:

John Kelly, Chief Scientist, Morningside Analytics

John Kelly is the founder and lead scientist of Morningside Analytics. His research blends social network analysis, content analysis, and statistics to solve the problem of making complex online networks visible and understandable. Kelly has directed studies of numerous domestic and international social media networks. He has a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, and has also studied communications at Stanford and at Oxford’s Internet Institute. He is an Affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he works with leading academics to design and implement empirical studies of the Internet’s role in politics and social action around the globe.

Gilad Lotan, VP of Research and Development, SocialFlow

Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development at SocialFlow where he leads the data science team focused on analyzing networked audiences, information flow and attention in social media. Previously, Gilad built social data visualizations at Microsoft’s FUSE labs. His past work includes ‘Retweet Revolution’, visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots, and a study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Gilad and his team provide insights and analysis for major brands and media outlets, more recently powering an Olympics data visualization for the The New York Times.

Gilad’s work has been presented at the MIT Center for Civic Media, Harvard’s Berkman Center, TED, Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) and SXSW. His work has been published at IJOC (International Journal of Communication), ICWSM (The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, HICCS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences) and covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, Fast Company and the Atlantic Wire. Most recently Gilad gave the opening Keynote at Dalhousie University’s Symposium on Measuring Influence on Social Media.