Social Media Analysis

Graduate course (co-lectured), Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarland University, 2016

Social media systems refer to online computer systems that enable users to interact, collaborate, and compete with one another at societal-scale. Examples of social media systems include, social networking sites (Facebook & Google+), blogging and micro-blogging sites (Twitter & LiveJournal), content sharing sites (YouTube & Flickr), social bookmarking sites (Delicious & Reddit), crowd-sourced opinion sites (Yelp & eBay), and social peer production sites (Wikipedia & Amazon’s Mechanical Turk). With their rising popularity and a myriad of applications built on top of them, they have become an integral part of everyone’s lives today. In this course, we will be examining the usage and design of these social media systems using an interdisciplinary approach that combines social network analysis, natural language processing, and large-scale data analytics.