Email: yulinyu@umich.edu

CURRICULUM VITAE

About

Yulin Yu is a PhD candidate at University of Michigan School of Information, advised by Prof.Daniel Romero. Her research interest is broadly in computational social science, data science, and innovation. Specifically, she studies how the novel use of big data and technology can both drive and hinder innovation across the domains of science, art, and the technology workplace, by developing and applying computational frameworks. By doing so, her work uncovers creative strategies to drive innovation. Specifically, Yulin’s work focuses on:

  • Data: understanding how scientific innovation can advance through the novel use of ‘big data’ and how we can automate innovation via predicting the need or use of novel datasets(PNAS 2024)
  • Technology: Exploring how people use AI for innovation or consume novel products, such as whether users are more likely to listen to novel music on AI-driven platforms(ICWSM 2023)
  • Social Network: Innovation is a social process. Investigating how emerging changes (e.g., remote work) or social factors (e.g., gender) foster or hinder a more diverse and interconnected human network—which is often crucial for innovation (PNAS 2022,WWW 2023, WWW 2024)
  • Measuring Culture: Leveraging AI to develop domain-specific, social theory-grounded computational measurements for capturing complex cultural dynamics. Examples include multi-dimensional music novelty (ICWSM 2023), data-use diversity (PNAS 2024), femininity measurement for film dialogue(Socinfo 2022), and global consensus/attention (EPJ DataSci 2025)

    Publications

    • Does the use of unusual combinations of datasets contribute to greater scientific impact? [PNAS'24: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ] [Link]
      Yulin Yu, Daniel Romero
    • Characterizing the Structure of Online Conversations Across Reddit [CSCW '24: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2024, ] [Link]
      Yulin Yu, Julie Jiang, Paramveer Dhillon
    • Exit Ripple Effects: Understanding the Disruption of Socialization Networks Following Employee Departures [WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024, ] [Link]
      David Gamba,Yulin Yu, Yuan Yuan, Grant Schoenebeck, Daniel Romero
    • Novelty in what sense? Heterogeneous relationships between novelty and popularity in music [ICWSM'23: Proceedings of the Seventeenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, IC2S2 2021, Special Recognition Award]
      Yulin Yu, Ben Cheung, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Paramveer Dhillon [Link] [Slide]
    • Large-Scale Analysis of New Employee Network Dynamics [WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, ] [Link] [Slide]
      Yulin Yu, Longqi Yang, Siân Lindley, Mengting Wan
    • Gendered Citation Patterns Among the Scientific Elite [ PNAS'22: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (40), e2206070119, 2022] [Link] [Poster]
      Kristina Lerman, Yulin Yu, Fred Morstatter, Jay Pujara
    • For more please see CURRICULUM VITAE

    Honors and Awards

  • EECS RISING STAR , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2024
  • CEW+ Scholar , University of Michigan, 2024
  • Special Recognition Award , 7th International Conference on Computational Social Science, 2021 (Music Novelty Paper)

    Research Internships