Dr. Chris Yang presents “Clarity in the Clutter: Automated Temporal Topic Organization in Social Media.”

Date: May 16, 2011
Location: College Park, MD

Drexel University’s Associate Professor Dr. Chris Yang presented the use of temporal logic-based topic organization systems for social media on Friday, May 13, at Optimal Solutions Group, LLC’s (Optimal’s) Brown Bag event. With Web 2.0 technology, anyone can contribute large amounts of data at any time on any website. This leads to an overload of topics, comments, and discussions on a multitude of issues that researchers and social media analysts must sift through, much of which is discarded as spam.

Dr. Yang’s solution is to utilize a content-based topic detection system focusing on temporal logic to organize threads of similar subject matter across time into a single area where one can readily analyze and access them for research. This is of great interest for healthcare and health policy sentiment analysis research as the technology can be used to conduct environmental scans of public attitude that can be accessed and organized for relevancy, thus allowing for effective public policy implementation.

Dr. Yang’s other research interests include social media analytics, Web search and mining, health informatics, security informatics, knowledge management, information visualization, privacy preservation, digital library and electronic commerce.