Aneesha Mathur defends her Master with Project, joining Oracle

June 08, 2020

Aneesha Mathur successfully defended her Master with Project on the topic of "The Role of Social Communication in Shaping Expert Performance". She will join Oracle as a Software Engineer.

Committee: Ambuj Singh (Chair), Francesco Bullo, Xifeng Yan

Abstract: Interpersonal relationships in the workplace can impact not only job satisfaction, but also employee performance and success. We aim to analyze daily communication among employees to reveal its effects on their long-term work performance.

Our work focuses on the investment industry where it has become increasingly important to value workplace relationships and their impact on professional decision-making and employee performance. Therefore, to analyze this phenomenon, we look at a dataset containing instant messages exchanged among hedge fund traders over a span of four years to demonstrate correlations between conversational features and profitability of traders.

This talk consists of two sections. First, I will go over some language modeling techniques that help us understand the nature of the conversations of these traders. Second, I will discuss features extracted from our data that have predictive power and high correlation with profits made by traders. Our experiments highlight two such features that contribute significantly to the efficiency of traders: sentiment stability and the size of traders’ social networks. Consequently, through our findings, we provide tangible indicators of effective communication.