The science behind social media

Experts from academia, industry and IBM discuss ways to "harness the buzz of the crowd"

The organizers behind Almadens' NPUC conference this year have an approach to computing that differs from the traditional research being done at the lab; rather than focusing on atom spin times and exploring nanoscale storage possibilities, Michelle Zhou, Eser Kandogan, Jalal Mahmud and their team at Almaden are studying artificial intelligence, online gaming, pervasive computing, and this year, data visualization, social networks and crowdsourcing.

During the 18th annual New Paradigms in Using Computers conference, experts from academia and industry, including Jan Bosch, VP of Innovation at Intuit, Ed Chi, principle scientist, PARC, subject matter experts from Stanford University, USC and UC Berkeley, and the founders of K9 Ventures and CrowdFlower, gathered to discuss everything from the business of crowdsourcing to effective microblogging analysis. In between the 10 speaker sessions spread throughout the day, demos and interactive displays lined the hallway, including Nokia Internet Pulse, which visualizes current discussion around a particular topic on Twitter. Jofish Kaye of Nokia Research Center described how the visualization defines positive words such as "love," and colors them. A view of the tool in action shows a map of all positive and negative words as well as the frequency; and, a tweet of his own at the end of the day summarized his visit to Almaden: "I like IBM Almeden [sic]. There's lots of old guys with beards around who look like they invented the spacebar or something. #npuc."

More demos focused on making work smarter and harnessing massive amounts of data on the web included Jan Pieper’s “Work Profiles,” a system designed to make enterprise collaboration easier and more effective by bridging personal email to shared collaborative tools and shared social tools. Laura Granka of Google presented an election forecasting model with online search traffic designed to help make sense of significant deviations between national and state search volume. A “SocialTelescope,” IBM’s Creek Watch iPhone app and automation via global crowdsourcing were also showcased during the poster session. Another IBM Research – Almaden project featured at the event focused on finding family and friends following the Haiti Earthquake in January 2010.

An animated Jure Leskovec of Stanford University kicked off the speaker sessions with "The Information of Networks" followed by Yan Liu's (USC) "Effective Microblogging Analysis with Less Supervision." A panel featuring experts on crowdsourcing followed. Sid Viswanathan, a panelist who just received his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 already earned the title of co-founder of CardMunch, a mobile business card transcription service that solves the business card problem by leveraging the power of crowd labor. His insights, along with those of James Everingham, founder and CTO of Pixazza, opened up a nice forum for crowdsourcing discussions along the panel and with the audience.

Heard at NPUC 2010

(via Twitter): "I like IBM Almeden [sic]. There's lots of old guys with beards around who look like they invented the spacebar or something. #npuc."
"Yeah, this place is the real deal. This is where they moved atoms and stuff like that."

"some really interesting talks at #NPUC , especially enjoyed Jure's presentation on the mutations of phrases http://bit.ly/tnQwA"

"Hearing @edchi at #npuc got me to use #MrTaggy to research angiogram - it uses iodide, may be allergic. Called dr, extra prep ordered. #fb"