Location: Jabara Hall, Room 260

Talk by Raiyan Abdul Baten, University of Rochester

Abstract
Socio-cognitive soft skills such as creativity, leadership, storytelling, debate, teamwork, and negotiation are vital for the future of work. Moreover, teams increasingly rely on online interaction platforms to navigate remote work. Elevating people’s soft skills and performance outcomes at scale, particularly in online interaction settings, is one of the aspirational challenges of our time. 

In this talk, I will focus on creativity—the most critical soft skill of the future. In particular, I will discuss how social interactions may affect the novelty of our ideas (or the lack thereof). Through the lens of our randomized experiments, I will explain how a social network’s connections and creative outcomes co-evolve in response to its members’ ideation performance, popularity, and identity attributes. I will touch on our modeling of the empirical insights (i.e., using agent-based, game-theoretic, deep neural, and statistical network models) and the validation approaches (i.e., in a real-life academic dataset). Bringing the findings together, I will discuss how AI-, HCI-, and policy-driven solutions can help boost people’s creative performances in a social network. I will conclude with my envisioned lines of work toward enhancing the soft skills and collective performances of humans, as well as combating belief polarization in online social platforms.

Bio
Raiyan Abdul Baten is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, advised by Dr. Ehsan Hoque. His research focuses on building technology for enhancing the soft skills and collective performances of humans. In doing so, he brings methods and materials from computer science, social science, psychology, network science, and cognitive science together. His work has been published in PNAS Nexus, Nature Scientific Reports, Royal Society Interface, and other reputed venues. He received his Ph.D. and master’s degrees from the University of Rochester, respectively in 2022 and 2018, and his bachelor’s degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2016.