Welcome to VRL Lab!

We work hard, dream big, and enjoy life while developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems. We leverage online and offline data to gain insight into human behaviors and analyze technological systems to mitigate threats against online conversations by developing techniques in machine learning, network science, and computational social sciences.

The VRL Lab is led by Onur Varol, an assistant professor at the Sabanci University Computer Science Program, with an affiliation with the Center of Excellence in Data Analytics. We named our lab as "viral" because we aim to breach disciplinary boundaries and make novel connections between them.

Lab news

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  We released a platform, called Secim2023.biz, to share data science insights and reports from our disinformation and coordinated activity detection project on upcoming 2023 Turkish Presidential Election.
• Onur Varol received The Young Scientist Award from the Turkish Science Academy 🎉
• Our project "Developing systems for coordination and automated behavior detection on online social networks" funded by TUBITAK 2247-D National Leader Researcher Grant. We will be hiring 5 graduate and postdoctoral researchers soon.