A Survey on Event Detection in Social Networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Event Detection in Social Networks"

by

Miss Jieying SHE


Abstract:

A diversity of social network platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are 
becoming popular in recent years. Thanks to the easiness of publishing and 
spreading information on these platforms, users can report instant news or 
emergencies and others can follow up or help spread the related messages. 
People can learn about certain events even more instantly on these 
platforms than on traditional news media platforms. However, due to the 
huge number of messages generated every second in these social networks, 
manually monitoring any instant event is costly and infeasible. 
Researchers have been exploring automatic event detection solutions for 
these platforms.

Automatic event detection in social networks is however non-trivial and 
challenging. In addition to the data amount on these platforms that urges 
for highly efficient algorithms, the noise of data requires event 
detection solutions to effectively distinguish event-relevant messages 
from a large number of spam or event-irrelevant ones.

In this survey, we first introduce the motivation of studying automatic 
event detection in social networks.  We compare how different event 
detection is in modern social networks than in traditional media, and 
clarify why this research topic is challenging. We then review current 
event detection techniques applied to social network platforms. 
Particularly, we focus on event detection on Twitter, a social media 
platform that draws most attention from researchers because of its 
popularity among users in reporting instant events and the challenges it 
brings to automatic event detection due to its noisy short messages. 
Finally, we discuss some future directions in this topic.


Date:			Thursday, 29 May 2014

Time:                  	3:30pm - 5:30pm

Venue:                  Room 5487
                         Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Lei Chen (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Huamin Qu (Chairperson)
  			Dr. Pan Hui
  			Dr. Raymond Wong


**** ALL are Welcome ****