Dr. Henry Kudzanai Dambanemuya is an Assistant Instructional Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago. His teaching includes core computational and research methods courses in the first and third perspectives sequences as well as course electives on collective intelligence, large-scale online experiments, and digital peacebuilding. He brings an interdisciplinary background in computer science, communication, and international peace studies to examine collective intelligence problems in complex systems. In his research, he conducts theory-driven investigations that rely on mining Big Data about human interactions and behavior, online experiments and surveys, crowdsourcing, natural language processing, and machine learning and statistical modeling frameworks. Supported by this novel combination of approaches, his research advances theories of collective intelligence and complex systems and makes methodological contributions toward computational social science, network science, social computing, and human-computer interaction.

The core contributions of his work are demonstrated by academic presentations in prime venues such as the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), the Network Science Society (NetSci), the International Communication Association (ICA), and several well-received publications at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Examples include international conferences on Web Science (WebSci and WebConf – formerly WWW), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (CHI), Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Collective Intelligence (CI), Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and Body Sensor Networks (BSN).

Dr. Dambanemuya holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Conflict Studies (double major) from DePauw University, an M.A. in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute in the Keough School of Global Affairs, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior (a dual program in Computer Science and Communication) from Northwestern University. He also brings relevant software engineering and data science knowledge from his experiences at RICS Software, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Chewy, Dataminr, and Microsoft Corporation. He continues to be active in the teaching and research communities and is committed to supporting students in their academic and industry careers.