A Survey of Visual Analytics in Social Media

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey of Visual Analytics in Social Media"

by

Mr. Yifang WANG


Abstract:

Social media has become very popular and huge amounts of data have been 
generated by various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, 
and TikTok. Analyzing these data has important applications in business, 
politics, and urban planning. Many automated social media analytics (SMA) 
algorithms have been developed but they also have limitations like low accuracy 
for fuzzy tasks and poor user interactions. Moreover, understanding the 
analysis process and results presents another obstacle for users. Visual 
analytics has thus been introduced to alleviate these problems, which leverages 
the advantages of both machine and human intelligence. Intuitive interfaces and 
rich interactions are provided to facilitate the analysis, understanding, and 
interpretation of social media data. Despite the advances in visual analytics 
of social media, researches in this field still lack a systematic overview of 
how the state-of-the-art work tackles complex data and what kind of new 
challenges and opportunities exist.

In this survey, we first briefly introduce the social media analytic framework 
and then follow this framework to present the key techniques of social media 
analysis in the visualization community. We start with the data aspect to get a 
quick overview of the data domain and special properties. Then the analytic and 
visualization tasks are specified. In particular, we classify the existing 
tasks into two categories, namely, content-based analysis and behavior-based 
analysis, which form the basis to guide the visual analytic techniques 
discussion. The survey ends with a discussion about the current research gap 
and future directions of social media visual analytics.


Date:			Wednesday, 2 October 2019

Time:                  	10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 2408
                         Lifts 17/18

Committee Members:	Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Chiew-Lan Tai (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Cunsheng Ding
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma


**** ALL are Welcome ****