[AIP Distinguished Lecture] Talk by Prof. Lexing Xie ( Australian National University) - “Online Attention: Processes, Graphs, and Online Optimization”

This talk will be held in a hybrid format, both in person at AIP Open Space of RIKEN AIP (Nihonbashi office) and online by Zoom. AIP Open Space: *only available to AIP researchers.

DATE & TIME
June 5, 2025: 10:30 am - 11:30 am (JST)

TITLE
Online Attention: Processes, Graphs, and Online Optimization

SPEAKER
Prof. Lexing Xie ( Australian National University)

ABSTRACT
What makes a video popular? What drives collective attention online? What are the similarities and differences between clicks and transactions in a market? This talk aims to address these three questions. First, I will discuss a physics-inspired stochastic time series model that explains and forecasts the seemingly unpredictable patterns of viewership over time. This model provides novel metrics for predicting expected popularity gains per share and assessing sensitivity to promotions. Next, I will describe new measurement studies and machine learning models that analyze how networks of online items influence each other’s attention. Finally, I will introduce a macroscopic view of attention, offering mathematical descriptions of market equilibriums and distributed optimization. Our ongoing work seeks computational descriptions of attention markets that can inform potential mechanisms for a healthier online ecosystem. Additionally, my group works on visualizing intellectual influence and decision-making in daily moral dilemmas, which opens up new questions on individual and collective attention.

BIOGRAPHY
Lexing Xie is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU), where she leads the ANU Computational Media Lab and directs the ANU-wide Integrated AI Network. Her research spans machine learning, computational social science, and computational economics, with a particular focus on online optimization, neural networks for sequences and networks, and applied problems such as online attention, NLP for climate change, decision-making by humans and machines. Lexing received the 2023 ARC Future Fellowship and the 2018 Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research. Her research has garnered seven best paper and best student paper awards at ACM and IEEE conferences between 2002 and 2019. Prior to joining ANU, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. She holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University.