Kathleen M. Carley is an American computational social scientist specializing in dynamic network analysis. She is a professor in the School of Computer Science in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Software Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also holds appointments in the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Background Kathleen Carley was born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1956. At High School her interest in social modeling was inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Artificial intelligence was not a career path at that time and she was dissuaded from studying Mathematics because of gender stereotyping. Instead she studied for an S.B. in economics and an S.B. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1984. Her Ph.D. advisor was Harrison White and her thesis was entitled Consensus Construction.
Career On leaving Harvard in 1984, Carley secured a position as assistant professor of Sociology and Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University where she remains based. In 1990 she became associate professor of Sociology and Organizations, in 1998 Professor of Sociology, Organizations and IT, and in 2002 attained her current role as Professor of Computation, Organization and Society. Since 1998 she has also held appointments in other CMU schools and departments; the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Heinz College, Tepper School of Business and Department of Engineering and Public Policy.
Research Carley's research combines cognitive science, sociology and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Methodologically she applies network science, machine learning, natural language processing, and agent based modeling to high-dimensional, large, and dynamic data. Carley is the founding co-editor and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory.
See also Dynamic network analysis
References
External links Carnegie Mellon - Kathleen Carley "Assessing Terror Networks" by Kathleen M. Carley on YouTube


