Business session in SMANE workshop: Social Media and News

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On 16 April 2012 Jochen Spangenberg (Deutsche Welle) moderated a business session as part of the "International Workshop on Applications in Social Media News and Entertainment (SMANE 2012)", which was held in cooperation with the msnd workshop ("Mining Social Networks Dynamics"), both supported by SocialSensor.

An introductory keynote presentation by Nic Newman, independent media consultant and former BBC staff, portrayed how social media is affecting the business and practice of journalism. This was followed by a panel discussion with:

  - Wilfried Runde, Deutsche Welle
  - Denis Teyssou, Agence France Press
  - Nic Newman

The panelists discussed some of the challenges of and opportunities for the news sector with regards to social media usage. It became clear that numerous obstacles still exist when it comes to effective and user-friendly use of content residing in social networks. Some of the challenges, to name but a few, are to find the "nuggets" that are out there, verify posted content, get in touch with contributors, discover trending topics quickly and efficiently, be alerted about breaking news in real time and many more. However, it also became obvious that, already, Social Media has had a profound impact on journalism and the way media organisations are conducting their business. This will continue to be the case. And with new and enhanced tools and services emerging, the panelists agreed that Social Media will continue to play a significant role in shaping the future of news and information provision.

The program of the entire workshop can be found here.

The workshop was part of the World Wide Web Conference, that was held from 16 to 20 April 2012 in Lyon, France, with keynotes by Neelie Kroes, Tim Berners-Lee, Bernard Stiegler and Chris Welty.

Summer School on Social Media Modeling and Search - Program updated

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The program of SSMS 2012 summer school has been updated. Confirmed lectures include speakers from Facebook, Yahoo!, INRIA, Bell Labs and many other distinguished researchers. Check-out the updated program here.

The 2012 Summer School on Social Media Modeling and Search (SSMS 2012) is taking place on 10-14 September 2012 in Fira, Santorini, Greece. The summer school is aimed at PhD students, young researchers and practitioners interested in social media modeling and analysis, online social interaction analysis and relevant approaches and applications in prediction, search and visualization. SSMS 2012 is an ACM Chapter event of the EuroMM, the European Chapter of the ACM SIGMM.

Social Event Detection evaluation task in MediaEval 2012 co-organized by SocialSensor

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SocialSensor is coorganizing the 2012 Social Event Detection Task of the MediaEval Benchmark Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation. This task requires participants to discover events and detect media items that are related to either a specific social event or an event-class of interest. The task is of interest to researchers in the areas of information retrieval, multimedia content analysis, social media analysis, event detection and event-based multimedia indexing.

ThessFest iPhone app

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CERTH has released ThessFest, the official iPhone application for the 14th Thessaloniki Documentary Fetival. The application is available for free on iTunes.

ThessFest first version offers the following features:

   -  Browse the updated Film Festival schedule by category and date.
   -  Search movies by keyword.
   -  See details of Festival movies and directors.
   -  Easily create and update your own screening schedule.
   -  Get directions on how to reach the Festival venues.
   -  Easily rate, tweet and comment movies.
   -  See real-time ratings, comments and tweets made by other users for each movie.
   -  Follow the Festival tweet stream.

Future versions will incorporate innovative technologies developed by SocialSensor, including real-time Festival-focused topic and trend monitoring, recommendations for points of interest and activities around the festival venues, link and discuss with like-minded Festival visitors,and 3D browsing of the Festival premises.

Summer School on Social Media Modeling and Search

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SocialSensor will organise in cooperation with CUBRIK the 2012 Summer School on Social Media Modeling and Search (SSMS 2012), on 10-14 September 2012 in Fira, Santorini, Greece. The summer school is aimed at PhD students, young researchers and practitioners interested in social media modeling and analysis, online social interaction analysis and relevant approaches and applications in prediction, search and visualization. Lectures include introductory and advanced courses by leading researchers from academia and industry, and will cover both theoretical and practical aspects of state-of-the-art research in these multi-disciplinary topics. SSMS 2012 is an ACM Chapter event of the EuroMM, the European Chapter of the ACM SIGMM.

Cooperation with Fête de la musique Berlin

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SocialSensor will cooperate with the Fête de la musique Berlin event in terms of the SocialSensor Infotainment use case. The cooperation aims at the development of advanced social media analysis technologies that enhance the attendance experience and will start with user requirements gathering and analysis.