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Social Media Research Blog

Hit me on twitterApril 18

A shout out to Mistah F.A.B for the new single "Hit me on Twitter"! ROTFL..

Interesting tweetweek with Oprah, Ashton and @CNNbrk making sure that everyone is partying on twitter!

ICWSM Dataset Workshop Accepted PapersMarch 20

We have a great lineup of papers at the main conference and the dataset workshop. Here are the accepted papers for the workshop

Identifying Personal Stories in Millions of Weblog Entries
Andrew Gordon and Reid Swanson

SentiSearch: Exploring Mood on the Web
Sara Sood and Lucy Vasserman

What Bloggers Talk About: Interconnection and Content Sharing in Weblogs
Meeyoung Cha, Juan Antonio Navarro Perez, and Hamed Haddadi

Event Intensity Tracking in Weblog Collections
Viet Ha Thuc, Yelena Mejova, Christopher Harris and Padmini Srinivasan

Quantification of Topic Propagation using Percolation Theory: A study of the ICWSM Network
Ali Azimi Bolourian, Yashar Moshfeghi and C. J. van Rijsbergen

 

 

 

Also a quick reminder -- Today is the last day for early registrations for ICWSM!

SXSW Panel on Collaborative filtersMarch 15

I am at SXSW this weekend and wow what a conference this has been! Met a lot of cool people and been to a bunch of happening parties! I plan to post a few updates about the conference. In the mean time here is a quick post from notes I wrote during the panel discussion on Collaborative Filters.

Anton Kast from Digg.com gave a brief history of collaborative filtering from the research literature covering tapestry (from parc) grouplens (UMN) and a few other projects mostly from 1990s and draws comparisons to current systems used in spam filters, pagerank , tagging systems and applications in facebook ads etc. The talk wasnt very technical and meant to be a quick overview for the audience that might not be familiar with the research background. Kast described recommendation as the output of collaborative filtering that is personalized for a particular user in the system. For example  amazon (people who bought this also bought..), behavioral ad targets, google news etc. I wish Kast had spent more time discussing the last slide which covered practical problems: sparsity problem in recommendation systems, early rater problem/cold start, gray sheep (small group very popular).

Erik Frey from last.fm shared some interesting stats -- 25m unique users/month. The types of relations that last.fm derives: songs-users, users-users. He also shared some insights on what were described as lean forward

Microsoft TechFest 2009February 26

This was my first experience at Microsoft's annual TechFest Event

"TechFest is an annual event that brings researchers from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world to Redmond to share their latest work with Microsoft product teams. Attendees experience some of the freshest, most innovative technologies emerging from Microsoft’s research efforts. The event provides a forum in which product teams and researchers can discuss the novel work occurring in the labs, thereby encouraging effective technology transfer into Microsoft products."

It was an opportunity to totally geek out on some really cool technology and an an absolutely fantastic chance to peek into what the future of computing holds for us. I am simply amazed at the amount of cool stuff that is out there. Ofcourse, I cant talk about many of the projects on display at TechFest 2009 but here are a few public videos you should definitely check out! A quick shout out for GeoLife 2.0 and Social Desktop among the ones (publicly available) that might be of interest to the social media community:

TechFest: Social Desktop

TechFest: GeoLife 2.0

Also check out a

Freedom of Speech BloggingFebruary 25

This is a really disturbing case and I am really infuriated by the Indian SC's politically biased decision in this matter:

"This chilling warning emerged as a Bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice P Sathasivam refused to protect a 19-year-old Kerala boy, who had started a community on Orkut against Shiv Sena, from protection against summons received from a Maharashtra court on a criminal case filed against him.

Petitioner Ajith D had started a community on Orkut against Shiv Sena. In this community, there were several posts and discussions by anonymous persons who alleged that Shiv Sena was trying to divide the country on region and caste basis.

Reacting to these posts, the Shiv Sena youth wing's state secretary registered a criminal complaint at Thane police station in August 2008 based on which FIR was registered against Ajith under Sections 506 and 295A pertaining to hurting public sentiment."

Shiv Sena -- a politico-religious party in India is often blamed for extremist views and many people have been outspoken in their criticism about Shiv Sena's policies. I am just shocked that this case would even have to be appealed in the Supreme Court of India and even worse -- the SC of India refuses to protect it's citizens freedom of spee