Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Let the TechFest Begin!

It is almost exactly a year ago that I joined Microsoft. I was lucky enough with my timing that my first week here coincided with TechFest. TechFest is an expo put on by Microsoft Research to showcase new and ongoing innovation internally. What I remember most about that first week was how impressed I was at the diversity of work being carried out by MSR. While this event is an internal one, there is also a press day which takes some of these research projects and demonstrates them to the media. This year's press day was yesterday.

The work that we've been doing in the social media space here at Live Labs is not yet ready for the outside world. However, one of the projects that builds on our work - done by a group of colleagues at MSR - was on display at yesterday's press event.

BLEWS (blogs and news) is an application that sits at the intersection between social media (in this case, weblogs) and main stream media (textual news). The project web site best sums up the goals:

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps. BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.

Here is a close up:

The application has had a reasonable amount of press coverage:

• Microsoft's cutting edge on display at TechFest
• Gushing over Microsoft Research at TechFest 2008
• TechFest takes a World View
• One big science fair for hundreds of Ph.D.s

Congratulations to the BLEWS team: Michael Gamon, Sumit Basu, Dmitriy Blenko, Danyel Fisher and Christian Konig.

Note also that we have a paper on the system to be presented at ICWSM in a few weeks.

Geeking with Greg

Exciting news: Greg Linden is going to be joining us here at Live Labs next week. Congratulations to Greg!

Listas: Live Labs Technical Preview

Live Labs recently announced a tech preview of a new social content platform names Listas. From the Live Labs blog:

Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.

Listas has one fundamental data structure - the list. The list allows for indenting - effectively the creation of hierarchical lists, or sub-lists. In addition to wiki-like editing of list data, Listas comes with another key component: a toolbar. With the toolbar installed, users can - upon encountering something they would like to store in a list - push data to their account on Listas. The toolbar page explains:

Quickly navigate to Listas web site.

One click to add a link to your current page to a list.

Select page content and click once to add it to a list.

Highlight web page "clippings" and add them to a list

Listas also offers a community aspect which allows for the sharing and joint editing of lists.

PhotoSynth on PBS | Wired Science

As written about on the PhotoSynth site.

NASA/Live Labs PhotoSynth

Adam writes about some more great demos of PhotoSynth, this time in collaboration with NASA.

Live Labs New Location

We've moved from Redmond to Bellevue. Virtual Earth has a nice 3d model of our new place (Lincoln Square) and up to date imagery.

Google Earth is currently a long way behind - the site is pretty much a bunch of cranes (though the image is copyright 2007). To be fair, Microsoft's images are of a not quite complete tower, but there is a lot more of it there. In fact, looking at the two images gives a nice timeline of construction, with Google (on the left below) being an older image than the Microsoft one (on the right).

 

BBC Teams with Live Labs

Briefly, the awesome BBC has teamed up with the awesome Live Labs to provide photo collections within our PhotoSynth system.

Intern Opportunities At Live Labs

There are still a few openings at Live Labs for interns. Take a look at the lab's pages. Live Labs is really gearing up to be a highly engaging place and is extremely well positioned to deliver influential work in many web related areas. There isn't any info up on the site right now about internships - so have a look at the jobs page for a flavour of the work that is carried out there. If you are interested, please contact Mukund Narasimhan (mukundn at microsoft d't com).