June 4, 2021
Staff Accomplishment

Volkova Invited to SIAM Panel

Svitlana Volkova, a chief scientist at PNNL, was invited as a panelist at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining

Svitlana Volkova presenting at SIAM

Svitlana Volkova, top row second from left, was an invited panelist at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

(Composite image by Shannon Colson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

Svitlana Volkova, chief scientist for decision intelligence and analytics at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), was invited as a panelist at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

This conference brought together technical leaders from government organizations and industry partners to discuss current and future opportunities for collaboration in research and development related to data science and advanced analytics.

“PNNL was represented among the top-tier leaders in artificial intelligence from government and industry,” said Volkova. “This was an excellent opportunity to share our recent research on cognitive security and descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to tackle national security mission problems.”

During the session, panelists discussed various resources available to academics and research scientists to support their ongoing research programs. They also helped participants understand the different federal government and industry opportunities to foster collaboration and learn focus areas in data science and advanced analytics.

At PNNL, Volkova builds and leads cross-functional research teams that develop cutting edge, AI-driven decision intelligence and analytics capabilities to explain and predict complex social systems and behaviors in the human domain.

Her team’s recent research on decision intelligence for cognitive security, which analyzed information diffusion during protests in Venezuela, was published by Nature Scientific Reports. This publication was followed by a comprehensive overview of machine intelligence capabilities to detect, characterize, and recommend interventions to influence operations in the information environment published in the Journal of Information Warfare. Data science and analytics approaches developed by Volkova and her team use a unique combination of deep learning, natural language processing, and causal models that have been successfully used to characterize and predict complex systems behavior where the role of the human is crucial (e.g., misinformation and disinformation diffusion and infectious disease dynamics).