Speaker: Jisun An, PhD candidate, University of Cambridge

Title: Analyzing Social Media for Designing Fit-For-Purpose Systems: From Politics to Business

Date: 11/19/2013

Time: 11am

Room: Informatics East 122

Abstract: Researchers in different disciplines have been studying human behavior in a variety of contexts, and have largely done so upon small-scale data coming from surveys and ethnographic observations. Social media sites now offer a unique opportunity to study individual and social characteristics at scale for a long period of time in unobtrusive ways. In this talk, I will focus on analyses done in two different contexts - political news sharing and micro-investment  - and will show how to translate the corresponding insights into practical implications for the design of fit-for-purpose systems. Biography: Jisun An is a PhD candidate in a Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a member of the NetOS group. Her research interest is in analyzing online social media and social network with large-scale data and leveraging its properties to a platform that supports people to make improved choices in social, economic and political domains. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning, network science, social science, and human computer interaction. For her study, she was funded by EPSRC and she is now an honorable recipient of Google European Scholarship in social computing. Since starting her PhD, she has been fortunate to have opportunities to collaborate with pioneers in social network analysis (e.g., MPI-SWS (Germany), KAIST (South Korea), PARC (USA), and Yahoo! Barcelona (Spain)).