“Time for Events: Telling The World's Stories from Social Media”

Please join us for the Information Science Colloquium with guest, Mor Naaman, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information.

Title: “Time for Events: Telling The World's Stories from Social Media”                                                                                                          

Abstract:  An overwhelming amount of information from real-world events is shared by individuals through social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. These events range from major global events like an uprising or an earthquake, to local events and emergencies such as a fire or a parade; from international media events like the Oscar's, to events that enjoy little media coverage such as a conference or a music concert. Regardless, this shared media represents an important part of our society, culture and history. At the same time, this social media event content is currently fragmented across services, hard to find, and often difficult to consume due to its sheer scale. Our research tackles three critical challenges in making social media information about events accessible and usable: 1) the detection of events in social media content, 2) Identification and ranking of content relevant to an event across social media sites, and 3) organization and presentation of event data to allow users to effectively explore, analyze, and experience an event through its social media content. Our work results in new tools that allow multiple stakeholders, such as journalists, first responders, researchers, policy makers and the general public, to see and understand the stories of world, as told in social media.

Bio:  Mor Naaman is an assistant professor at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, where he runs the Social Media Information Lab. His research applies multidisciplinary methods to gain new insights about people and society from social media data, and to develop novel tools to make this data more accessible and usable in various settings. He is also a co-founder and CTO at Mahaya, a startup founded to extract the world's stories from social media data. Mor worked as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is a recipient of a NSF Early Faculty CAREER Award, research awards from Google, Yahoo!, and Nokia, and three best paper awards. Find out more about Mor at http://mornaaman.com.

Information Science Colloquium talks are free and open to the public.