Social Media Analytics Made Easy

Irvine, August 4, 2017  — SURFIoT mentor and UCI Prof. Chen Li was the featured speaker at the SURFIoT Summer Seminar Series, Thursday, Aug. 3, at CALIT2.

Li's presentation,”Social Media Analytics Made Easy“ offered an overview of a current research project that is designed to allow users with little IT experience to easily analyze social media.

Many companies and organizations need software solutions to harvest valuable knowledge from large amounts of data especially in IoT applications. One of the important IoT domains is social media, such as Twitter tweets, Facebook messages, and Weibo, where humans essentially act as sensors to produce a huge amount of information at an unprecedented speed. Analyzing this type of information is critical to researchers and practitioners who want to gain insights and make time-critical decisions, Li said.

UCI Prof. Chen Li was the featured speaker at the SURFIoT seminar

The project uses TextDB as a system to support cloud-based text analytics with a GUI-based interface for query formulation. In his demonstration of the system, Li, showed how Mr. Walter White, the fictional chemistry teacher from the television show, Breaking Bad, could use the integrated solution to conduct drug-related tweet analysis to make his next important decision.

SURFIoT Fellows attend a series of seminars during the summer program to get a deeper understanding of ongoing research projects and enhance their knowledge about telecommunications and information technology systems and applications. Students will present their research findings Aug. 31, at the SURF-IoT Symposium at CALIT2.

The program, co-sponsored by UCI’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and CALIT2, provides students with a unique experience. Each student has the guidance of a UCI faculty mentor, along with the opportunity to gain experience and advanced training in state-of-the-art facilities and techniques.

To learn more about SURF-IoT visit here.