CS 6604: Social Media Analytics
Naren Ramakrishnan

Online social media has radically changed how we view, process, and
exchange information. Blogs, microblogs, social networks and
communities, have ushered in new mechanisms to observe social behavior
in action. This course will focus on algorithms for characterizing
social media feeds, analyzing them to find patterns of interest, and
forecasting from the past to aid analysts in making interpretations
and decisions. The course will feature a reading list from recent
literature (KDD, WWW, WSDM, ICWSM conferences) and students will be
given access to exclusive social media feeds (from Twitter and
Facebook, e.g.,) that are not available in the public domain. The
course will also benefit from the "big data" infrastructure supporting
the EMBERS project
(http://www.eng.vt.edu/news/researchers-study-new-ways-forecast-critical-societal-events).
Students will be expected to rapidly familiarize themselves with
background literature and implement new algorithms for characterizing
and forecasting from social media streams. Pre-requisites: Graduate
work in algorithms/databases/machine learning/data mining strongly
recommended. Familiarity with Hadoop, Hive, BigTable, and cloud
computing technologies is a major plus.