Social Media Mining

With the rise of social media, the web has become a vibrant and lively Social Media realm in which billions of individuals all around the globe interact, share, post, and conduct numerous daily activities. Information is collected, curated, and published by citizen journalists and simultaneously shared Citizen Journalism or consumed by thousands of individuals, who give spontaneous feedback. Social media enables us to be connected and interact with each other anywhere and anytime – allowing us to observe human behavior on an unprecedented scale with a new lens. This social media lens provides us with golden opportunities to understand individuals at scale and to mine human behavioral patterns otherwise impossible. As a byproduct, by understanding individuals better, we can design better computing systems tailored to individuals’ needs that will serve them and society better. This new social media world has no geographical boundaries and incessantly churns out oceans of data. As a result, we are facing an exacerbated problem of big data – “drowning in data, but thirsty for knowledge.” Can data mining come to the rescue?