Invited talk at Strathclyde University

I gave a departmental seminar on the 21st of October, at the Computer & Information Science Department, University of Strathclyde.

My talk was titled "Making sense of social network data for smart city applications". Here is a summary:

The wide use of social networks and richness of interactions between users and their physical environments through these, has generated in the last few years a wealth of information that quantifies the citizens' and visitors' experience of their surroundings. Most of these data is easily accessible through publicly available APIs and in fact, several researchers have demonstrated in their work the value of this data in applications such as tourism or urban planning. There remain, however, several important problems with the use of such data, which have not been yet addressed in scientific research. The handling of redundant or obsolete data regarding venues that are no longer in operation, the fusion of data from multiple social networks, the exploration of causal relationships between data indicators, the semantics of captured data and the verification of the reliability of this data in terms of capturing urban dynamics, are hard issues that remain unexplored. The talk discusses some of the open issues in this field of research and preliminary steps towards addressing these, with the hope to stimulate an active discussion on ways forward for research.

The slides are also available to download!