Social Media: Analysis and Application

Scott Counts from Microsoft Research chairs this session at Faculty Summit 2012.

This session addresses the study and use of social media. Social media have massively democratized the production and distribution of information, and as such are impacting virtually every aspect of our world, from politics and the economy to news and even crisis management. For scientists who want to study this phenomenon, social media represent a body of information that is real-time, largely text-based, semi-structured, highly diverse, and embedded in social structures. Thus, social media are of interest to a tremendous range of scientists, including ethnographers, sociologists, computer scientists, and computational linguists. This session focuses on techniques, application areas, and research opportunities in the social media domain.