Dr. N. Sadat Shami

N. Sadat Shami, Ph.D. is the Director of Talent Development, Engagement, and Social Analytics (TALES) at IBM since 2018. He is a computational social scientist passionate about behavioral research on large scale (social) data. He is an expert at analyzing quantitative and qualitative data to deliver insights and inform strategy.

His research interests are in social computing and computer-supported cooperative work. His current interests are at the intersection of Organization Science and Social Media Analytics. His team of researchers and practitioners focus on delivering business insights by pushing the boundaries of the inferences that can be drawn by combining large scale social media data with enterprise data.

Prior to his current role, Sadat worked at the Center for Engagement and Social Analytics at IBM Corporate Headquarters, where he held global responsibility for employee engagement and IBM employee social media analytics and strategy.

Previously he worked at IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he led research on microblogging, social file sharing, and the use of virtual worlds for meetings and conferences.

Sadat joined the Collaborative User Experience Group at IBM Research in the summer of 2008 as a Social Computing Researcher. His primary research areas were computer supported cooperative work, computer mediated communication, and social computing. Specifically, his interests were in the design of theoretically informed systems that can act as effective ‘interventions’ to support knowledge workers. He enjoys developing systems that embrace the potential of emerging technologies but also have a strong grounding in socio-cognitive theories of behavior.

After three years, he moved to Armonk as Workforce Social Analytic where he used social computing technologies to understand the pulse of IBM employees.

In 2015, he became the Manager of the Center for Engagement & Social Analytics, and in 2017, the Director.

Sadat earned his Ph.D. in Information Science from Cornell University, where he majored in Human Computer Interaction. His dissertation, Making Sense of Strangers’ Expertise From Signals in Digital Artifacts, focused on identifying experts using social media data in large globally distributed organizations.

Prior to starting his Ph.D., he was a research associate at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he developed multi-player online games to study distributed collaboration. His research has been presented at various international conferences such as CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, ECSCW, DIS, INTERACT, GROUP, and HICSS.

Sadat has lived in five countries and while he does not intend to live in any more, he certainly looks forward to visiting many more. He enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, jogging, photography, and finding new places to visit and eat in Westchester County and in New York City.

His publications include:

• Spread of Employee Engagement in a Large Organizational Network: A Longitudinal Analysis, 2017
• Machine Learning and Grounded Theory Method: Convergence, Divergence, and Combination, 2016
• Influences of Peers, Friends, and Managers on Employee Engagement, 2016
• Inferring Employee Engagement from Social Media, 2015
• Facebook@Work — The Use of Social Media for Work-related Exchange and Support, 2015
• Common Ground and Small Group Interaction in Large Virtual World Gatherings, 2011
• Adapting a Face-to-Face Role-Playing Simulation for Online Play, 2006
• ‘Collocation blindness’ in partially distributed groups: Is there a downside to being collocated?, 2006
• A globalization simulation to teach corporate social responsibility: Design features and analysis of student reasoning, 2006
• Context of use evaluation of peripheral displays (CUEPD), 2005
• Designing A Globalization Simulation To Teach Corporate Social Responsibility, 2004

Read his presentation about Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace. Read An interview with Sadat, Christian Peter, and Regan Mandryk on Computers That Measure Our Emotions.

Watch his presentation and talk at SonicNU Speaker Series. Watch his talk about Leadership Transformation in the Digital Age at the 2018 Corporate Insight Summit. At CHI 2018, Sadat joined the talk titled All Work and No Play? Conversations with a Q&A Chatbot in the Wild.

Visit his LinkedIn profile, his IBM page, and his old Cornell University profile. View and read his list of publications at Google Scholar, dblp, and Semantic Scholar. Read his Interaction Design profile. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.