ज्ञानकर्मसमुच्चयवाद

My work centers around the processes by which we create and communicate knowledge, and how those processes shape our institutions. In particular, my interests lie in understanding how information is created through the communication process, how knowledge is structured by the rhetorics of modernity. I employ and advocate for mixed methods approaches, leveraging the science of complex systems and natural language processing as novel methods for deconstruction and critique alongside corpus and ethnographic approaches. This theoretical emphasis is not without practical goals, as the core of my research ethos is the belief that only though a combination of theory and action can we achieve the liberation we are seeking--a sentiment reflected by the Sanskrit word shown above. 

Publicly Available Resources

Wu, Siqi, Schöpke-Gonzalez, Angela, Kumar, Sagar, Hemphill, Libby, and Resnick, Paul. “HOT Speech: Comments from Political News Posts and Videos that were Annotated for Hateful, Offensive, and Toxic Content.” Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-04-20. 

Northeastern University LaTeX Templates

Forthcoming: emgraph - a package for graphs in high dimensional embedding spaces. 

Publications

Choi, M., Pei, J., Kumar, S., Shu, C., & Jurgens, D. (2023). Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmark. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2023).

Sikdar, S., Venturini, S., Charpignon, M. L., Kumar, S., Rinaldi, F., Tudisco, F., ... & Majumder, M. S. (2024). What we should learn from pandemic publishing. Nature human behaviour, 1-4.

Schöpke-Gonzalez, A., Wu, S., Kumar, S., Resnick, P. J., & Hemphill, L. (2023). How We Define Harm Impacts Data Annotations: Explaining How Annotators Distinguish Hateful, Offensive, and Toxic Comments (arXiv:2309.15827). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15827

Ontiveros, J., Correll Carlyle, R., Puri, A., Kumar, S., Tregub, A., Nitirahardjo, C., ... & Majumder, M. S. (2023). Classification Performance Thresholds for BERT-Based Models on COVID-19 Twitter Misinformation. Available at SSRN 4489865.

Schaber, K. L., Kumar, S., Lubwama, B., Desai, A., & Majumder, M. S. (2023). An Epidemic Model for Multi-Intervention Outbreaks. medRxiv, 2023-06.

Martoma, R. A., Washam, M., Omar, H., Martoma, A. R., De Souza, R., Kumar, S., ... & Majumder, M. S. (2024). Epidemiologic analysis of a postelimination measles outbreak in central Ohio, 2022-2023. JAMA network open, 7(8), e2429696-e2429696.

Presentations

Kumar, Sagar. "Moving Beyond Diffusion to Communication in Models of Information Spread." Contagion on Complex Systems Workshop. Burlington, USA. August 2023. Oral presentation. 

Kumar, Sagar. “Getting People on the Ground: Coming to Understand the Success of #Parkland Through a Timeline of Co-Occurring Hashtags.” 6th International Conference on Computational Social Science. Cambridge, USA. June 2020. Poster presentation. 

Waldherr, Annie, Gallagher, Ryan, ... Kumar, Sagar, ... Foucault-Welles, Brooke. “Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Cases of Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States.” 71st Annual International Communication Association conference. Virtual. Video presentation. 

Kumar, Sagar. “Effects of Singular Versus Periodic Shocks in Narrative Formation” Lake Como School ‘Complex networks: theory, methods, and applications (7th ed.).’ Como, Italy. May 2023. Oral presentation. 

Venturini, Sarah, Sikdar, Satyaki, Charpignon, Marie-Laure, Kumar, Sagar, et al. “The COVID-19 research outbreak: how the pandemic culminated in a surge of new researchers.” 2nd International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation. Evanston, USA. June 2023. Oral presentation. 

Venturini, Sarah, Sikdar, Satyaki, Charpignon, Marie-Laure, Kumar, Sagar, et al. “The COVID-19 research outbreak: how the pandemic culminated in a surge of new researchers.” 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, DE. July 2023. Oral presentation.  

Essays, Case Studies, and Other Writing