Golshan Madraki, an assistant professor of Engineering and Management at Clarkson University has been awarded an AAUW American Research Grant for the 2022-23 year for her research proposal “A Quantified Gender-Based Analysis of Polarization in Social Media.”
Founded in 1881, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is one of the world’s largest sources of funding for women scholars. These prestigious awards are highly competitive and selective.
Madraki says social media platforms can be extremely polarized which can cause bias, discrimination, radicalism, hatred, and more. Polarization refers to a sharp division into groups of contrary beliefs.
The algorithms used in most social media platforms provoke polarization. What this means is that social media pages suggest posts based on similar backgrounds, and will show posts that match users’ homophily. The media networks offer free, easily-accessible platforms for users to express unfiltered opinions to a wide range of audiences.
Madraki’s goal is to study polarized social media by “quantitatively characterizing the networks of sampled male and female politicians and pundits, and mathematically analyze their polarization level over gender-sensitive topics.”
While most previous studies focus on societal or political aspects of polarization in media, Professor Madraki will focus on gender-based polarization using graph theory, algorithms, and data analytics. There are currently very few studies in this area, and users of social media platforms tend to be unaware of this polarization.
Madraki is an assistant professor of Engineering & Management at Clarkson’s Reh School of Business. She got her Ph.D. degree in Industrial and System Engineering from Ohio University, in 2017. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Management in 2010 and 2013 respectively from Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran. Her areas of expertise include Algorithm, Graph Theory, Social media, Operations Research, and Mathematical Modeling.
