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     COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER
AND THE SCHOOL OF PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, & COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES
               (CSI 898-Sec 001 crosslisted with PHYS 703)
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            Geosocial Analysis of Social Media Feeds

                    Anthony Stefanidis
       Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science 
             George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

The emergence of social media has provided the public with an effective and
irrepressible real-time mechanism to broadcast information. The great
popularity of platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, and the substantial
amount of content that is communicated through them are making social media a
valuable source of information for a variety of applications. The information
communicated through such feeds conveys the interests and opinions of
individuals, and reveals links and the complex structure of social networks.
However, this information is only partially exploited if one does not consider
its geographical aspect. Indeed, social media feeds more often than not have
some sort of geographic content, communicating the location from where a
particular report is contributed, the geolocation of an image, or referring to
a specific hotspot. By harvesting this geographic content from social media
feeds we can transfer the extracted knowledge from the amorphous cyberspace to
the geographic space, and gain a unique understanding of the human landscape,
its structure and organization, and its evolution over time. In this talk I
will present sample test cases to demonstrate sample applications that benefit
from harvesting such open source information.

The presentation reflects research activities undertaken by Mason’s GeoSocial
team, comprising the speaker, and Drs. Croitoru (GGS) and Crooks (Krasnow),
and Mr. Radzikowski (Center for Geospatial Intelligence). For more information
please refer to http://geosocial.gmu.edu. Twitter: @GeoSocialMason

                         March 31, 2014
                            4:30 pm
          Room 3301, Exploratory Hall, Fairfax Campus

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM.
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Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminars.htm