ICWSM '08, Day 0

Today I attended a Day 0 of ICWSM '08. ICWSM is the conference organized by a group of researches in the Social Media area along with Matt Hurst.

Both tutorials were quite interesting. Jan Wiebe talked about subjectivity and sentiment analysis. According to some conference attendees, sentiment is a hot topic right now. Lots of business people would like to use the results of a sentiment mining. However, they're sceptical about how reliable these results are. Jan provided lots of details about different type of sentiment and objectivity-related annotations which exists for a data. The analysis part though, wasn't quite evolved.

Mary McGlohon talked about different ways to study big graphs. Examples of big graphs are: web-links graph, frend graphs on social networks, blog links. There are interesting properties of measures of such graphs, such as diameter, in/out-degree. Since graphs are also matrices, diagonalization tricks such as SVD can be applied, which lead to interesting results. Interestingly, the evolution of graphs in time can be studied using tensor analysis. Turns out, tensor is a three-dimensional matrix. I really should've paid more attention to my Math and Physics classes instead of hacking C++ code! I highly recommend checking out Mary's slides at http://icwsm.org/2008/tutorials.shtml

Tomorrow will be a great day which will start with a talk by a LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick. Stay tuned for more updates!