This class is usually taught by Markus Schedl in the winter term. The class is taught in English.

Information for the current semester (if available):

Description

This course will be held foremost as an exercise in which students will implement and refine existing approaches to a task in context of social media mining or analysis. The work will be conducted in teams, each of which will select a topic to work on. The requirements to complete the course (and earn a positive grade) are the following:

• gaining an understanding of the selected task and existing solutions
• conducting a literature research and writing a short report about existing work on the topic (max. 3 pages)
• implementing and evaluating a refined version of an existing approach (or an innovate novel approach)
• giving a presentation of the topic, implemented approach/solution, and its evaluation (about 30 minutes per team)
• writing a scientific article about the approach in the style of a conference submission (about 10 pages) 

Topics students can choose from include, but are not limited to the following (own suggestions are welcome too):

• influential user detection
• network structure analysis
• sentiment analysis
• flow analysis
• analyzing aspects such as similarity or diversity in user preferences
• categorization of users from their digital traces (demographics, mood, personality, habbits, etc.) 
• studying the interrelationship between music taste and consumption patterns (e.g., time of day) or other user characteristics (e.g., country)
• trend detection and popularity prediction
• localizing microblog messages or other multimedia material
• real-world event detection
• country of origin detection (for persons, music artists, bands, or other items)

Many other possible topics can be derived, for instance, from the proceedings of the ICWSM conference:
    http://icwsm.org/2016/program/program, opens an external URL in a new window
    http://icwsm.org/2015/program/program, opens an external URL in a new window
    http://icwsm.org/2014/program/program, opens an external URL in a new window
    ...

Also the following book gives an overview about basics in mining user-generated content:
    Marie-Francine Moens, Juanzi Li, Tat-Seng Chua (eds.), Mining of User Generated Content and Its Applications, CRC Press, January 2014., opens an external URL in a new window