I am a 6th year PhD student in social psychology working with Jamie Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on naturalistic observation of groups through online behavior and communication. My work has focused on two areas: how individuals work together to solve problems and how reactions to emotional events, such as disease outbreaks or keeping large personal secrets, change social communication.

I graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a degree in Math and Integrative Biology in 2005. Here is my Curriculum Vitae.

Projects

MathOverflow

We have been examining status and motivation to contribute in the online community MathOverflow. MathOverflow is a specialized question and answer site like Yahoo! Answers for academic mathematicians. It provides the opportunity to look at scientific collaboration and crowdsourcing. For more details see [results]

Secrets Project

Have you been keeping a big secret? We just finished recruiting participants who have been keeping a big secret and who were willing to share an anonymized sample of their emails. We will be examining the effect of keeping a secret on social relationships. For more information go to the Texas Archive Project.

H1N1 Epidemic

We examined the daily change in reactions to H1N1 epidemic via language used on blogs and the number of visits to H1N1 related Wikipedia pages. For more details see [poster]

Scientific Research Group

We collected instant message conversations between members of a research group for a period of 15 months. We investigated the language of the main 18 participants using text analysis tools and social networks. For more details see [slides] [poster]

Publications

Papers

Book Chapters and Manuscripts

Teaching

Short Courses on Matlab, Div. Statistics & Scientific Computing

Introduction to Psychology (Summer 2010) [syllabus]

Simple Helper Code

Counts emoticons in text (python): Extension of LIWC to count emoticons [code]

Fun Projects

I worked on a project with Henry Segerman to visualize dialogues and conversations. We were inspired by Wordle, which uses the size of the word to represent the frequency of the word in the text. In addition to using size to represent frequency, we used color and position to represent the relative use of the word by the two speakers and the average time during the conversation when the word was used. We applied this visualization to presidential dialogues, plays, and instant message conversations. Feel free to contact me to have your conversation visualized.

To the right is a visualization of the first 2008 presidential debate. Words that are used more by Obama are in blue and words used more by McCain are in red. Obama talked more about troops, tax and energy, whereas McCain talked more about spending, government and strategy, they both talked about the presedency. Position of the words along the x-axis represents the average time when the words were spoken. It's easy to see that it focused on economic issues early on and foreign policy issues later.

About my name

You might be wondering about the origin of either my first or last name. My last name is Hungarian although it often appears in different incarnations with different spellings. My first name is from the genus of the tree frog native to Davis, the Pacific Tree Frog, Hyla regilla (minus the first letter!). Since I was born the tree frog has been reclassified into a different genus. It is now called Pseudacris regilla.

Yla is essentially the name Ayla, a common Turkish name, that gained popularity in the US (397th most common female name) in two surges around 1986 and 2005. See Wolfram Alpha. I hypothesize the two increases were due to the release of The Clan of the Cave Bear movie in 1986 and the appearance of Ayla Brown on American Idol in 2005 (who was born during the first surge in 1988).