Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

DoodleBuzz

DoodleBuzz is worth taking a look at. A very different way of interacting with textual data (annotated with concepts).

[thanks to IanG for the tip.]

Scientific American

A couple of my blogosphere visualizations appear in this months Scientific American, illustrating an article written by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee. The online version only contains one of the images, shown below.

The Price of Greed

The graph below gives me some hope for the citizens of the west. While Wall Street is in the toilet, the Bush administration is proposing to bail out the various financial institutions with $500 Billion dollars. This is, essentially, the price of the greed that free market economies, capitalism and conservative governance encourages. Hopefully, this will mean less money to commit war. I’m glad the blogosphere at least is calling it as it sees it.

Data Visualization can be Fun!

Some fun with data visualization (original, thanks Alexey).

This kind of thing really reminds me of the BBC’s television version of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

ICWSM Call for Papers

The CFP for ICWSM 2009 is now officially out!

Call for papers – 2009

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The social and community driven aspects of our digital lives continue to rapidly increase, resulting in transformative behaviours and, significantly, publishing and distributing huge amounts of fascinating data. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will meet once more in 2009 to discuss the latest research analyzing and leveraging this resource. As with previous meetings, we will bring together a wide range of researchers and industry practitioners from many disciplines providing a unique opportunity for sharing ideas and collaboration in this space.

AREAS OF INTEREST

Disciplines which are relevant to our meeting include computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies. The following are key areas of interest:
[01] Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
[02] Analyzing relationship between social media and mainstream media
[03] Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors both within genres and between genres of data
[04] Ranking/relevance of blogs; web page ranking based on blogs
[05] Data acquisition: crawling/spidering and indexing
[06] Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
[07] Multimedia: tools and techniques for distribution, sharing, and analysis of social activity with/around multimedia.
[08] Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization
[09] Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management; collaborative creation of structured knowledge
[10] Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction
[11] Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery; collaborative filtering
[12] Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
[13] Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
[14] New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
[15] Trust; reputation; recommendation systems

IMPORTANT DATES

Tutorial Proposals: December 1, 2008
Paper Submission: January 21, 2009
Poster/Demo Submission: January 21, 2009
Paper Acceptance: February 27, 2009
Poster/Demo Acceptance: February 27, 2009
Camera Ready Copies: March 10, 2009
Tutorials: May 17, 2009
Conference: May 18-20, 2009

SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should submit through the ICWSM-09 website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by the deadlines given above (Midnight PST). Papers must be must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the AAAI author instructions page at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). Authors must register at the ICWSM-09 technical paper submission web site (available by November 15, 2008). The software will assign a password, which will enable the author to log on to submit an abstract and paper. In order to avoid a rush at the last minute, authors are encouraged to register as soon as possible.

Submissions to Other Conferences or Journals
ICWSM-09 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or conference. This restriction does not apply to submissions for workshops and other venues with a limited audience.

REGISTRATION

All accepted papers and extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. At least one author must register for the conference by the deadline for camera-ready copy submission. In addition, the registered author must attend the conference to present the paper in person.

PUBLICATION

All accepted papers and abstracts will be allocated eight (8) pages in the conference proceedings. Authors will be required to transfer copyright of their paper to AAAI.

DATA CHALLENGE

ICWSM-09 is planning to release a large blog dataset in conjunction with the conference. This data will include the full content and markup of the blog post as well as extracted text. The conference invites researchers to explore the dataset and submit their findings as technical papers. More information will appear soon on the conference website.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND TUTORIAL SPEAKERS

Traditionally the conference invites world renowned experts to present tutorials and give keynote talks. These will be announced soon.

General Chairs

• William W. Cohen, Carnegie Mellon/Google
• Nicolas Nicolov, J.D.Power and Assoc., McGraw-Hill

Program Chairs

• Natalie Glance, Google
• Matthew Hurst, Live Labs, Microsoft

Data Chairs

• Ian Soboroff, NIST
• Akshay Java, UMBC

Local Chair

• Cameron Marlow, Facebook

Program Committee

• Lada Adamic, University of Michigan, USA
• Navot Akiva, Pudding Media, Israel
• Noor Ali-Hasan, Microsoft, USA
• Chris Brooks, University of San Francisco, USA
• Claire Cardie, Cornell University, USA
• Steve Cayzer, HP Labs, UK
• Lili Cheng, Microsoft, USA
• Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH, Germany
• Brian Dennis, Lockheed Martin Corporation, USA
• Chris Diehl, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, USA
• Joan Morris DiMicco, IBM Research, USA
• Nathan Eagle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Miriam Eckert, J.D. Power and Assoc., McGraw-Hill, USA
• Raymond Elferink, RayCom B.V., The Netherlands
• Andrew Fiore, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Michael Gamon, Microsoft, USA
• Kathy E Gill, University of Washington, USA
• Scott Golder, Cornell University, USA
• Marko Grobelnik, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Michelle Gumbrecht, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
• John Henderson, MITRE, USA
• Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
• Steliana Ivanova, Umbria Inc., USA
• Heng Ji, The City University of New York, USA
• Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
• Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
• Jason Kessler, Indiana University, USA
• Pranam Kolari, Yahoo!, USA
• Christian Konig, Microsoft, USA
• Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
• Gueorgi Kossinets, Google, USA
• Andrea La Pietra, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Thomas Lento, Facebook, USA
• Kristina Lerman, University of Southern California, USA
• Jure Leskovec, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Naohiro Matsumura, Osaka University, Japan
• Charles Mi, Opinmind, USA
• Rada Mihalcea, University of North Texas, USA
• Gilad Mishne, Yahoo!, USA
• Paola Monachesi, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Mor Naaman, Rutgers University, USA
• Kate Niederhoffer, Nielsen, USA
• Scott Nowson, Appen, Australia
• Manabu Okumura, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Livia Polanyi, Powerset/Microsoft, USA
• John Prager, IBM Research, USA
• Stephan Raaijmakers, TNO ICT, The Netherlands
• Drago Radev, University of Michigan, USA
• Laura Ripamonti, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
• Tamas Sarlos, Yahoo!, USA
• Jonathan Schler, Peer39, Israel
• David A. Shamma, Yahoo! Research, USA
• James G. Shanahan, USA
• Xiaolin Shi, University of Michigan, USA
• Sanjay Sood, allvoices, USA
• Ellen Spertus, Google, USA
• Siddharth Suri, Yahoo!, USA
• Hideaki Takeda, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• Jiang Yang, University of Michigan, USA
• Cheng Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Jun Zhang, University of Michigan, USA
• Ding Zhou, Facebook, USA

For general information regarding ICWSM-09, please write to icwsm09@aaai.org.

What Should Blog Search Look Like?

This summer, Marti Hearst has been visiting Microsoft Research. Marti, with contributions from Sue Dumais and myself, put together a position paper on weblog search to be presented in October at CIKM: What Should Blog Search Look Like?

The Numerati - Stephen Baker

I've just started in on The Numerati by Stephen Baker. It promises to dive into how our lives expose more and more of our characteristics online, and how those bits are being mined for the benefit of the consumer economy. Having read the first chapter, it looks like Stephen writes in a very narrative and evocative style.

Baby Palin Brings Home the Bacon

Having failed to better Obama’s level of attention, the McCain campaign finally goes over the top and bursts through by revealing that Palin’s 17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant.

Palin is, for the moment, getting more attention than either Obama or McCain!