Office Address: 216B Gilmer Hall
Website: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/hudson-golino

Biography

Hudson Golino’s research focuses on quantitative methods, psychometrics and machine learning applied in the fields of psychology, health and education. He is particularly interested in new ways to assess the number of dimensions (i.e. latent variables) underlying multivariate data using network psychometrics. 

Dr. Golino has been leading the field of Natural Language Processing, Data Science, and Large Language Models in the Social Sciences, Psychology, and related fields at the University of Virginia, securing grants for three major initiatives:

1. Developing new methodologies for investigating how compositional and generalization properties of language models can be formalized and tested, as well as how to address interpretability by incorporating concepts from quantum information theory and network psychometrics.
2. Developing innovative techniques and software to model text data by combining methods from dynamic systems, natural language processing, large language models, network science, and psychometrics.
3. Creating a groundbreaking toolkit for dimensionality assessment and reduction that integrates network science, information theory, quantum information theory, and psychometrics, for cross-sectional, longitudinal, intensive-longitudinal, and text data.

He has been developing a new set of quantitative techniques and metrics, integrated in a general approach – termed Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA), that is part of the relatively new area of network psychometrics. Particularly, he combines network science, information and quantum information theory, as well as computational methods to address fundamental problems in psychometrics, with the following goals: (1) to improve the estimation of the number of latent factors in an automatic (or semi-automatic) way, (2) to develop innovative fit indices for structural analysis and dimensionality assessment/reduction, (3) to improve the estimation and the interpretability of latent factors in intensive longitudinal data, (4) to develop new techniques for item analysis from a network psychometrics perspective (including, for example, network loadings, item parameters and new metrics of reliability), and (5) to construct general representations of structure built from intraindividual variability, quantifying the homogeneity of individuals using new metrics of complexity.

In 2012 he was awarded with the International Test Commission Young Scholar Scholarship and in 2015 he received the Sanofi Innovation in Medical Services award for developing a system to improve the prediction accuracy of outcomes in intensive care units using machine learning models.

Golino completed his Ph.D. in March 2015 at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), where he studied applications of machine learning in Psychology, Education and Health. 

Golino also holds an M.Sci. in Developmental Psychology (2012), an B.Sci. in Psychology (2011), all from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. At UVA, he will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on quantitative methods at the Department of Psychology. He expects to offer courses on applied machine learning for Psychologists and on the construction and validation of assessment instruments.

Currently his research focuses on: 1) integration of information theory and network psychometrics to estimate the number of latent factors; 2) the development of non-linear dimensionality assessment techniques based on network psychometrics; 3) the development of new topic modeling techniques based on network psychometrics; 4) text mining and machine learning applied to several fields (including political science and cyber-security).

Hudson is always looking for new collaborators, and for creative and innovative ideas and applications.

For more information, please visit his website:  https://uva.theopenscholar.com/hudson-golino.