Geo-Social Footprints in Social Media: Opportunities and Challenges
James Caverlee
Texas A & M University
Talk
James Caverlee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on web-scale information management, distributed data-intensive systems, and social computing. Most recently, he's been working on (i) spam and crowdturfing threats to social media and web systems; and (ii) geo-social systems that leverage large-scale spatio-temporal footprints in social media. Caverlee is a recipient of the 2010 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award, the 2012 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award, and a 2012 NSF CAREER Award. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 2007, M.S. degrees in Computer Science (2001) and in Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research (2000) from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Economics from Duke University (1996, magna cum laude).
The widespread adoption of GPS-enabled tagging of social media content via smartphones and social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) uncovers a new window into the spatio-temporal activities of millions of people. These "footprints" open new possibilities for understanding how ideas flow across the globe, how people can organize for societal impact, and lay the foundation for new crowd-powered geosocial systems. In this talk, we'll highlight our recent work on mining, modeling, and analyzing large-scale geospatial footprints and suggest new future research opportunities that leverage these footprints.