Unfun.me: Destroying Jokes to Learn about Humor

Bob is an assistant professor of Computer Science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab. His research aims to understand, predict, and enhance human behavior in social and information networks by developing techniques in data science, data mining, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

​

Humor is an essential human trait (even for Germans, such as the speaker), yet it is notoriously hard to grasp scientifically (especially for Germans, such as the speaker). To make progress on the scientific, data-driven study of humor, Bob and colleagues have developed an online language game called Unfun.me. In this talk, Bob will describe the game and explain how the data collected through it can be used to shed light on what makes satire funny.