Date: January 11, 2012
Time: 2:00 ~ 3:00 pm
Location: Oh Sang-Soo Seminar Room
Speaker: Ed Chi, Research Scientist, Google
Host: Alice Oh

Title: Location and Language in Social Media

Abstract:
Despite the widespread adoption of social media internationally,
little research has investigated the differences among users of
different languages. Moreover, we know relatively little about how
people reveal their location information.  In this talk, I will
outline our recent characterization studies on how users of differing
geographical locations and languages use social media.

First, on geographical location: We found that 34% of users did not
provide real location information in Twitter, frequently incorporating
fake locations or sarcastic comments that can fool traditional
geographic information tools.  We performed a simple machine learning
experiment to determine whether we can identify a user’s location by
only looking at what that user tweets.

Second, on language, Examining users of the top 10 languages, we
discovered cross-language differences in adoption of features such as
URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets.

We discuss our work’s implications for research on large-scale social
systems and design of cross-cultural communication tools.

Homepage:
edchi.net

Speaker Bio:
Ed H. Chi is a Staff Research Scientist at Google. Until recently, he
was the Area Manager and a Principal Scientist at Palo Alto Research
Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. He led the group in
understanding how Web2.0 and Social Computing systems help groups of
people to remember, think and reason. Ed completed his three degrees
(B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and
has been doing research on user interface software systems since 1993.
He has been featured and quoted in the press, including the Economist,
Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press.

With 20 patents and over 90 research articles, his most well-known
past project is the study of Information Scent --- understanding how
users navigate and understand the Web and information environments. He
also led a group of researchers at PARC to understand the underlying
mechanisms in online social systems such as Wikipedia and social
tagging sites. He has also worked on information visualization,
computational molecular biology, ubicomp, and recommendation/search
engines, and has won awards for both teaching and research. In his
spare time, Ed is an avid Taekwondo martial artist, photographer, and
snowboarder.