Introducing SocialSensor
SocialSensor collects, processes, and aggregates big streams of social media data and multimedia to discover trends, events, influencers, and interesting media content.
Watch this video to learn more about SocialSensor
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms, all produce an overwhelming amount of data. Whether they use social media casually or professionally, users are finding it increasingly difficult to stay on top of what’s happening across the range of available platforms.
The aim of the SocialSensor project is to develop software that meets this challenge. The result is a set of software applications that collect data from social media and automatically transforms it into interesting, relevant, and entertaining content for the purposes of both news and infotainment.
The vision that has guided the SocialSensor project can be summed up in a single sentence: “SocialSensor quickly surfaces trusted and relevant material from social media - with context.”
· quickly: SocialSensor works in real time;
· surfaces: SocialSensor automatically discovers, clusters, and searches;
· trusted: SocialSensor automatically supports the verification process;
· relevant: SocialSensor personalizes content;
· material: SocialSensor handles text, images, audio and video;
· social media: SocialSensor utilizes a number of social media platforms;
· with context: SocialSensor organizes content by location, time, sentiment and influence.
News and Infotainment
SocialSensor is for anyone who wants to know what’s happening on social media. In particular, the SocialSensor project has been guided by two ‘use cases’: news and infotainment.
- ‘Professional news’ and ‘casual reader’ applications.
- For use by professional news editors, journalists, and casual readers.
- To discover new interesting social content and integrate it in the news creation and
delivery lifecycle.
- EventLive’, ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Social Media Walls’ applications.
- For use by everyone.
- To use new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences whilst attending large events, such as music festivals.
Results of the work done with respect to these two use cases can be found in the results as well as the evaluation sections.
How SocialSensor works
The SocialSensor project has developed a new framework for enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search in the Social Web. SocialSensor has moved beyond conventional text-based indexing and retrieval models by mining and aggregating user inputs and content over multiple social networking sites. Social Indexing incorporates information about the structure and activity of the users’ social network directly into the multimedia analysis and search process.
To do this, the SocialSensor project has developed and introduced the concept of Dynamic Social COntainers (DySCOs), a new layer of online multimedia content organisation with particular emphasis on the real-time, social and contextual nature of content and information consumption. Through the proposed DySCOs-centered media search, SocialSensor integrates social content mining, search and intelligent presentation in a personalized, context and network-aware way, based on aggregation and indexing of both UGC and multimedia Web content.
Several of the project key components are available as open-source projects on GitHub.
Get SocialSensor
SocialSensor for mobile
A beta version of the SocialSensor ‘News’ iPhone/iPad mobile app is available now from the iTunes Store.
Other software applications that have been produced during the course of the project can be found in the applications section.