Scalable real-time crisis mapping and analytics of social media streams for disaster management and breaking news

Real-time geoparsing of social media streams (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, FourSquare) is providing a new 'virtual sensor' capability to end users such as emergency response agencies (e.g. Tsunami early warning centres, Civil protection authorities) and news agencies (e.g. Deutsche Welle, BBC News). Challenges in this area include scaling up natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) approaches to handle real-time traffic volumes, reducing false positives, creating real-time infographic displays useful for effective decision support and providing support for trust and credibility analysis using geosemantics. I will present in this seminar on-going work by the IT Innovation Centre over the last 4 years (TRIDEC and REVEAL FP7 projects) in building such systems, and highlights our research towards improving trustworthy and credible of crisis map displays and real-time analytics for trending topics and influential social networks during major news worthy events.

Mendeley: background information

Quick overview of mendeley plus a video of a talk about the startup process from 2010. Interesting from a new business model perspective

Research on Social Network Sites

A bibliography of research on Social Network web sites. The research contained below is focused specifically on social network sites (or "social networking" sites). Some of this is connected to social media, social software, Web2.0, social bookmarking, educational technologies, communities research, etc. but this is not the organizing focus and not everything related to these other topics is included here. This list is not methodologically or disciplinarily organized. There is work here from communications, information science, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, cultural studies, computer science, etc.

Team Quintinlessness: Open source software resource set

INFO2009 Assignment 2 reference list for team "Quintinlessness" - Subject: Open source software

A Brief History of the Web

The Web is now so ingrained in our lives that it is easy to forget that it is less than twenty years old. But the History of Web goes back much further, to the pioneering technologists who built the first hypertext systems and the men and women before them who imagined great libraries of interconnected information that would augment human intellect and drive civilization forward. In this lecture we will explore the pre-digital origins of the Web, look at how it developed into the mass communication system we have today, and speculate on the next stages of its evolution in the context of Web Science and Social Media.

The New Web Literacy

Web 2.0 is sometimes described as the read/write web, giving everyday users the chance to create and share information as well as to consume information created by others. Social media systems are built on this foundation of participation and sharing, but what is the mindset of these users, and are they quite so everyday as we might suppose? The skills and attitudes held by users can be described as their literacy, and there has been a lot of debate over the last few years about how to describe these literacies, and design for them. One field that has been changed radically by this notion is Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) where a fierce debate has raged about the potential of a new generation of highly literate digital natives, and Edupunks have argued for open and personal systems that challenge traditional models of institutional control. In this session we look at the arguments surrounding digital literacy and examine TEL as an example of how social media can change an application domain.

Privacy

Privacy is a concept that has been with us for hundreds of years, but it is relatively recently (the last 130 years or so) that it has been seen as something that needs protection as a legal right. Technology has presented many challenges to privacy, from the printing press to recording devices to communication hacking, but Social Media seems to present something new - a phenomenon of people giving up their personal information to an extent that would be considered extraordinary just a generation ago. In this lecture we look at attitudes and behaviors around privacy, see how social norms have shaped our expectations of privacy, and how we have come to trade our privacy for value, making complex (and sometimes ill-informed) risk decisions. We will also explore how people really behave on Social Media systems, to see whether we (as a society) should be concerned about modern attitudes to privacy, and whether there are any advantages that might balance that concern. Finally we look at how technology can be applied to the problems of privacy, both as a preventative measure, but also by aiding transparency and helping people to make better privacy decisions. These slides were updated for 2014.

Mining Events from Multimedia streams, Jon Hare

peaker(s): Jon Hare Organiser: Time: 25/06/2014 11:00-11:50 Location: B32/3077 Abstract The aggregation of items from social media streams, such as Flickr photos and Twitter tweets, into meaningful groups can help users contextualise and effectively consume the torrents of information on the social web. This task is challenging due to the scale of the streams and the inherently multimodal nature of the information being contextualised. In this talk I'll describe some of our recent work on trend and event detection in multimedia data streams. We focus on scalable streaming algorithms that can be applied to multimedia data streams from the web and the social web. The talk will cover two particular aspects of our work: mining Twitter for trending images by detecting near duplicates; and detecting social events in multimedia data with streaming clustering algorithms. I'll will describe in detail our techniques, and explore open questions and areas of potential future work, in both these tasks.

Data-Driven Text Generation using Neural Networks & Provenance is Complicated and Boring — Is there a solution?

Title: Data-Driven Text Generation using Neural Networks Speaker: Pavlos Vougiouklis, University of Southampton Abstract: Recent work on neural networks shows their great potential at tackling a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This talk will focus on the Natural Language Generation (NLG) problem and, more specifically, on the extend to which neural network language models could be employed for context-sensitive and data-driven text generation. In addition, a neural network architecture for response generation in social media along with the training methods that enable it to capture contextual information and effectively participate in public conversations will be discussed. Speaker Bio: Pavlos Vougiouklis obtained his 5-year Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2013. He was awarded an MSc degree in Software Engineering from the University of Southampton in 2014. In 2015, he joined the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group of the University of Southampton and he is currently working towards the acquisition of his PhD degree in the field of Neural Network Approaches for Natural Language Processing. Title: Provenance is Complicated and Boring — Is there a solution? Speaker: Darren Richardson, University of Southampton Abstract: Paper trails, auditing, and accountability — arguably not the sexiest terms in computer science. But then you discover that you've possibly been eating horse-meat, and the importance of provenance becomes almost palpable. Having accepted that we should be creating provenance-enabled systems, the challenge of then communicating that provenance to casual users is not trivial: users should not have to have a detailed working knowledge of your system, and they certainly shouldn't be expected to understand the data model. So how, then, do you give users an insight into the provenance, without having to build a bespoke system for each and every different provenance installation? Speaker Bio: Darren is a final year Computer Science PhD student. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering at Southampton in 2012.