Social Media Treasures for Data Science

Abstract:

Social media is becoming a hub for most of internet users to communicate, share their thoughts, report news, and express themselves. Large amount of research started to utilize the huge amount of data from social media in many different applications. In this talk, three example fields of research with social media data are presented. Initially, the task of Information retrieval is discussed, where the main objective is to retrieve the most relevant information needed from social media effectively and efficiently. Secondly, data mining applications from social media is presented and demoed for applications such as text classification and sentiment analysis. Thirdly, using social media for computational social science studies is presented with some focus on political issues. Few examples are presented, including: network dynamic during Egyptian Military coup 2013, studying the antecedent of ISIS support on social media, public response towards Muslims after Paris attacks 2016, and Finally, the nature and dynamics of social media during the US Presidential Election 2016. Most of the work in this presentation was featured in news articles in popular press, such as CNN, Washington Post, the Independent, Aljazeera, the Daily Mail, and Mirror.

Biography:

Walid Magdy is a Lecturer at the school of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh (UoE). His main research interests include computational social science, information retrieval, and data mining. He received his PhD in 2012 from the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland. Earlier, he received his BSc. and Msc. degrees from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt in 2005 and 2008 respectively. Before joining UoE, Walid worked for five years as a scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). He also worked at his early career for IBM and Microsoft as a research engineer between 2005 and 2008. Walid has over 50 peer-reviewed published articles in top tier conferences and journals, such as SIGIR, ECIR, ICWSM, CSCW, CIKM, IP&M, IRJ, and TOIS. Some of his work was featured in popular press, such as CNN, Washington Post, the Independent, Daily Mail, and Mirror. He also has a set of 9 patents filed under his name. Recently, Walid is initiating a start-up company called TweetMogaz based on one of his research projects. TweetMogaz is a news platform entirely generated from tweets using state-of-the-art automatic information filtering and presentation methods. Homepage: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wmagdy/