Social Media Mining CSE 494/598, Fall 2011

1. Social Media MiningCSE 494/598, Fall 2011 • Introduction Huan Liu Huan.Liu@asu.edu School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering Arizona State University http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/SMM11F/cse494-598.htm Fall 2011

2. Course Information • Social Media Mining • Line numbers: • CSE494 - 85511 • CSE598 - 84001 • Prerequisites: • CSE 471 or equivalent • CSE 310 Data Structures and Algorithms • Classroom and Hours: • CDN62, TTh 01:30 – 02:45pm • Webpage: • http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/SMM11F/cse494-598.htm

3. Introduction • Instructor: Huan Liu, huan.liu@asu.edu,http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu • Office Hours: • TTh2:45 - 3:45pm, BYE 566    Other times: by appointment only • TA and Office Hours • Reza Zafarani: Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:00 - 4:00pm, BYENG 214 (tentative) • Ali Abbasi • Please send email to the TAs for meetings

4. Course workload and evaluation • A lot of work is expected from you! Are you ready? • 3 Homework assignments (20%) • Projects (20%) • 3 Exams or equivalent (60%) • Class participation, Quizzes (extra points for upgrading) • Late penalty: • YES and exponentially increased (-1, -3, -7) • Academic integrity(http://www.public.asu.edu/~huanliu/conduct.html)

5. Slides and Schedule • Announcements are made regularly in Blackboard. Emails will be sent out on a need basis. • Weekly Schedule - Please visit Blackboard for Course Documents and Blog (i.e., Discussion Board). • Experienced researchers or practitioners may be invited as guest instructors for specific topics.

6. Weekly Schedule (tentative) and Syllabus

7. Text and Reference Books • Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, (available in pdf), David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press 2010. • Networks: An Introduction, Mark Newman, Oxford University Press, 2010. • Community Detection and Mining in Social Media, Morgan & Claypool, 2010. (available via ASU eLibrary) • Modeling and Data Mining in Blogosphere, Morgan & Claypool, 2009. (available via ASU eLibrary) • Web Data Mining - Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents, and Usage Data, Bing Liu, Springer, 2011 (2nd Edition) • Mining the Web - Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data, SoumenChakrabarti, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003 • Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar, Vladimir Batagelj, Cambridge, 2005, Package and Manual • Social Network Analysis - Methods and Applications, Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Cambridge, 1994

8. What is Social Media Mining

9. Course Description • Social Media Mining is concerned with the study of social behavior and mining social media data with both attribute- and link- data. • The Web 2.0 technologies allow a passive reader (or an average Joe) to become an active producer (or a shining online star), which creates a phenomenal landscape change in terms of Web-based activities. With various social media (Digg, del.licio.us, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), people can share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves, as well as producing many new media via techniques such as mashing up. • Social networks naturally emerge with the pervasive use of social media. Combining social computing and Web analytics, this course aims to introduce the state-of-the art developments in Web 2.0 techniques, social networks and analysis, network analysis and graph theory, information extraction, link analysis, and Web mining, to study new problems with social media, and to learn innovatively how to apply multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving. • The ultimate goal is to sharpen problem solving skills of our senior and graduate students, and prepare them with this unique set of expertise for the increasing demands in IT industry and for advanced research.

10. An Emerging Field • What is next big impact of computer science? • Bioinformatics manifests the significant and lasting impact of CS on biology • Pervasive use of Web and Internet fosters cultural and behavioral changes • Friendship networks • Citizen journalism and Blogosphere • Folksonomy (digg, reddit) • Rich activities in a virtual world and in the boundary of virtual and physical worlds • An unprecedented laboratory for research

11. A New Trend • Social Media Mining • Social networks • Communities • Interactions • Social media • Observational data and lots of them • Both content and link information • Mining • Modeling • Learning • Prediction

12. New Challenges • Everyone can develop a unique voice or publish • Challenge 1:How can I be heard? • There exist numerous of online sources • Challenge 2: Which one should I use? • People participate in activities on Web • Challenge 3: How can one improve their experience and create relevant business opportunities?

13. Challenge 1: How can I be heard • Everybody can speak up, but people only listen to a few • Information is cheap, but attention is costly. • If you were one of the few, you could at least make living without any “traditional” job • Sometimes, a real treasure might be buried forever • How to discover hidden treasures • If that is difficult, how to make us first visible • Study how a star develops, shines, and what others do (influence, diffusion, and cascading)

14. Challenge 2: Which source should I use • Information overloading • Abundance is good, but too many choices can mean no choice (any déjà vu?) • Information fusion or integration • Filtering irrelevant and/or redundant information • Discovering complementary information • Comparison shopping • Trust and reliability • How to discern the real from the fake • Spam

15. Challenge 3: Improve user experience • A business perspective – how to help generate profit for a business or make me rich • Better experience means (or leading to ) more traffic or more purchases • Understanding • Who are they? • Who influence them? • How to engage their influencers? • Data, data, and data • Data collection and analysis

16. Objectives of Our Course • Understand social aspects of the Web • Social media, mining, social networks • Learn what collectable data/statistics are • Data collection, cleaning, and summarization • Study or ask interesting research issues from individual experience – start-ups, … • Learn representative algorithms and tools • Investigate something interesting and new • Share our findings among us and in the world

17. Format • Lectures • Guest lectures • Class participation - important • Discussion, Class wiki, • Reading, Presentation, Critiquing • Project, Presentation, and Report • Exams, homework assignments, …

18. Social Media

19. Definition Social Media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways.

21. Social Media, Samples • A wiki article • Web reviews and ratings of a popular hamburger restaurant in your city • E.g., Yelp.com • An online social network of your professional contacts • E.g., Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com • an iPhone application that informs you about the police and camera locations in a road • “The Web is dead.” – Chris Anderson of wired.com

22. Types of Social Media • Online Social Networking • Publishing • Blogging • Wiki • Micro blogging • Social News • Social Bookmarking • Media Sharing • Video Sharing • Photo Sharing • Podcast Sharing • Opinion, Review, and Ratings Websites • Answers • Entertainment

23. Online Social Networking Online Social Networks are web-based services that allow individuals and communities to connect with real world friends and acquaintances online • Interactions • Friendship interaction • Friends, like, comments, … • Media Sharing • Send and receiving messages • Samples • Facebook.com • MySpace.com • Bebo.com • Orkut.com

24. Blogging A blog is a journal-like website for users, a.k.a. bloggers, to contribute textual and multimedia content, arranged in reverse chronological order • maintained both individually or by a community (See a tutorial at KDD http://videolectures.net/kdd08_liu_briat/) • Usages: • sharing information and opinions with friends and strangers • A medium for disseminating subject-specific content. • Who is the influential http://videolectures.net/wsdm08_agarwal_iib/

25. Different types of blogs • Personal blogs • Political blogs • blogs are being written about politics • Business blogs • Blogs related to businesses and professionals • http://blogmaverick.com/ • ‘Almost media’ blogs • Some blogs are media businesses in their own right, taking advertising and employing a blogger or a group of bloggers full-time • http://www.businesspundit.com/ • Mainstream media blogs • editors and reporters of newspaper’s blogs • http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/

26. Microblogging Microblogging is a relatively new phenomenon that can be considered as a counterpart to blogging, but with limited content • Usage • communication medium • social interaction • citizen journalism • Service Providers: • Twitter • Google buzz

27. Wiki A wiki is a collaborative editing environment that allows users to develop Web pages using a simplified markup language • Wikipedia allows interested individuals to collaboratively develop articles on a variety of subjects. • Using the wisdom of crowds effectively, it has become a comprehensive repository of information useful to a variety of individuals

28. Wiki-Samples • Wikipedia.org • Wikileak.com • Wikimedia.com • Wikitravel.com • WikiHow.com • WikiAnswers.com • Wiki.asu.edu • Dmml.asu.edu/wiki

29. Social News Social News refers to the sharing and selection of news stories and articles by a community of users. • Users can share articles that they believe would interest the community • Samples: • Digg.com • Slashdot • Fark • Reddit

30. Social Bookmarking Social Bookmarking sites allow users to bookmark web content for storage, organization and sharing. • These bookmarks can be tagged with metadata to categorize and provide context to the shared content, allowing users to organize information making it easy to search and identify relevant information. • Samples • Delicious.com • StumbleUpon.com

31. Media Sharing Media sharing is an umbrella term that refers to the sharing of a variety of media on the web. Users share such multimedia content of possible interest to others • Samples: • Video Sharing: • YouTube.com • Photo Sharing: • Flicker.com, picasa.com • Document Sharing: • Scribd.com, Slidesharec.om • Livecasting: • Justin.tv, Ustream.com

32. Opinion, Review, and Ratings Websites Opinion, review, and ratings websites are websites whose primary function is to collect and publish user-submitted content in the form of subjective commentary on existing products, services, entertainment, businesses, places, etc. Some commercial sites may serve a secondary purpose as review sites by publishing product reviews submitted by customers. • Examples • Cnet.com • Epinions.com • yelp.com • tripadvisor.com

33. Socially-Provided Answers In these sites, users who require certain guidance, advice or knowledge can ask questions. Other users from the community can answer these questions based on knowledge acquired from previous experiences, personal opinions or from relevant research. • Unlike review and opinion sites, which contain self-motivated contribution of opinions, answer sites contain knowledge shared in response to a specific query. • Samples: • WikiAnswers, Yahoo Answers

34. Main Characteristics • Participation • social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience. • Openness • most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content – password-protected content is frowned on. • Conversation • whereas traditional media is about “broadcast” (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation. • Community • social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a political issue or a favorite TV show. • Connectedness • Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people.

35. Why Social Media now? • Sharing ideas • Cooperating and collaborating • Thinking, debating, writing • Find new friends, rediscover the old ones • People can find information, inspiration, like-minded people, communities and collaborators faster than ever before. • New ideas, services, business models and technologies emerge and evolve at dizzying speed