As the IRSS continues, many speakers have been invited to give presentations on emerging research topics and especially on  the cognitive systems viewpoint as well as the Social Media and Digital Preservation theme. On behalf of SocialSensor, Symeon Papadopoulos post-doctoral research associate at CERTH-ITI was invited as a speaker and gave a very interesting talk on Community Detection in Social Media.

The presentation discussed the topic of community detection in the context of Social Media. Community detection constitutes a significant tool for the analysis of complex networks by enabling the study of mesoscopic structures that are often associated with organizational and functional characteristics of the underlying networks. Community detection has proven to be valuable in a series of domains, e.g. biology, social sciences, bibliometrics. However, despite the unprecedented scale, complexity and the dynamic nature of the networks derived from Social Media data, there has only been limited discussion of community detection in this context. More specifically, there is hardly any discussion on the performance characteristics of community detection methods as well as the exploitation of their results in the context of real-world web mining and information retrieval scenarios. To this end, this talk first frames the concept of community and the problem of community detection in the context of Social Media, and provides a compact classification of existing algorithms based on their methodological principles. The survey places special emphasis on the performance of existing methods in terms of computational complexity and memory requirements. It presents both a theoretical and an experimental comparative discussion of several popular methods. Finally, the presentation deals with the interpretation and exploitation of community detection results in the context of intelligent web applications and services and the domain of multimedia analysis and mining.

The presentation slides can be found here.

The International Research-Centered Summer School (IRSS) in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Robotics, Social Media, Digital Preservation which is co-organized and supported by the SocialSensor project, has kicked off and will last till the end of July. The school takes place at NCSR "Demokritos", in Athens, Greece. With a strong focus on mini-projects of month-long duration, carried out by multiple teams of 3-4 students including a mix of academic levels (Postdoc, PhD, undergraduates) the school has an innovative format and aims at establishing long-term collaborations as well as bringing about numerous scientific publications.

The students are also being trained on several tools of the SocialSensor platform and will carry out relevant research work which, if successful will be further utilized in the course of the SocialSensor project.

For more information on IRSS please visit: http://irss.iit.demokritos.gr/

SocialSensor recently announced the launch of the mobile app FeteBerlin to support the Fête de la Musique festival in Berlin to celebrate the European Music Day and the beggining of the summer. The app was a great success, getting more than 5000 downloads and very positive reviews. SocialSensor's research objectives were successfully incorporated, enhancing the app and  adding value to the end users and the event organizers as well. By transforming big data into awareness and leveraging innovative data mining techniques SocialSensor provided intuitive features and social media analytics that helped capturing event highlights, enriched the event experiencd for attendees and provided insightful data to event organizers.

SocialSensor is happy to announce the launch of the mobile application for the Fête de la Musique, Berlin.  With an objective to provide a far richer event experience to the 2013  Fête attendees, SocialSensor delivered an app available both in AppStore and Google Play. With its intuitive  features the app is the entire Fête de la Musique experience displayed in a visually beautiful feed.

The SocialSensor News use case will be presented as a live demonstration in terms of the EU projects session of the 14th International Workshop on Iamge and Video Analysis, WIAMIS 2013, to be held in Paris on 3-5 July 2013.

SocialSensor co-organised a joint workshop with SMART and iCore projecs, on "The Sensing Smart City" in terms of the Pre FIA workshops in the context of the Future Internet Assembly event that takes place in Dublin (7-10 May, 2013). SocialSensor was presented in the workshop, where several projects from the Connected Media, smart cities and IOT domains participated. The program also included a panel session with fruitful discussions about combining city sensors with social media sensing technologies.