Opportunities of Social Media Data Mining

October 28, 2015 - NYU Shanghai hosted its first Workshop on Mining Social Networks. The day-long event explored a number of themes ranging from textual mining and the application of natural language processing tools to the “crawling” of Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) and extracting from data regional sentiment. The workshop was held in the university’s new ideaLab.

The event’s organizer, Dean Keith Ross, summed up the motivation behind hosting the effort, saying “hopefully this will lead to collaborative projects on social media among researchers in Shanghai.”

The keynote speech by US Santa Barbara’s Ben Zhao on the challenges of “crawling” kicked off the packed sessions that also featured speakers from NYU Shanghai, ECNU, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University. The 35 or so NYUSH faculty and students, including a number of local PhD students, who crowded into the ideaLab, actively engaged in discussions about the challenges and opportunities of the unprecedented amounts data being generated everyday by interacting, sharing, and consuming content through social media.