Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Spring 2010

From SeMalticWiki

Contents 1 Instructor and Venue 2 Description 3 Syllabus 4 Grading

Instructor and Venue

• Instructor: William Cohen, Machine Learning Dept and LTI
• Course secretary: Sharon Cavlovich, sharonw+@cs.cmu.edu, 412-268-5196
• When/where: Tues-Thus 10:30-11:50, 4102 GHC
• Course Number: MLD 10-802, cross-listed as LTI 11-772
• Prerequisites: a machine learning course (e.g., 10-701 or 10-601) or consent of the instructor.
• TA: there is no TA for this course
• Syllabus: Syllabus for Analysis of Social Media 10-802 in Spring 2010
• Office hours: TBA

Description

The most actively growing part of the web is "social media" - e.g.. wikis, blogs, bboards, and collaboratively-developed community sites like Flikr and YouTube. This course will review selected papers from the recent research literature that address the problem of analyzing and understanding social media. Topics that will be covered include:

• Text analysis techniques for sentiment analysis, analysis of figurative language, authorship attribution, and inference of demographic information about authors (e.g., age or sex).

• Community analysis techniques for detecting communities, predicting authority, assessing influence (e.g. in viral marketing), or detecting spam.

• Visualization techniques for understanding the interactions within and between communities.
• Learning techniques for modeling and predicting trends in social media, or predicting other properties of media (e.g., user-provided content tags.)

Students should have a machine learning course (e.g., 10-601 or similar) or consent of the instructor. Readings will be based on research papers. Grades will be based on class participation, paper presentations, and a project. More specifically, students will be expected to:

• Prepare summaries of the papers discussed in class. Summaries will be posted on this wiki.

• Present and summarize one or more "optional" papers from the syllabus (or some other mutually agreeable paper) to the class.

• Do a course project in a group of 2-3 people. The end result of the project will be a written report, with format and length appropriate for a conference publication.

Syllabus

• To be posted.

Older syllabi:

• Syllabus from the Fall 2007 version of the course

Grading

Grades are based on

• The class project (50% - including the presentation and the writeup).
• The paper presentation (20%).
• The paper summaries submitted throughout the course (20%).
• Class participation (10%).