The Olympic Games are an important sporting event with notable consequences for the general economic landscape of the host city. Traditional economic assessments focus on the aggregated impact of the event on the national income, but fail to provide micro-scale insights on why local businesses will benefit from the increased activity during the Games. In this paper we provide a novel approach to modeling the impact of the Olympic Games on local retailers by analyzing a dataset mined from a large location-based social service, Foursquare. We hypothesize that the spatial positioning of businesses as well as the mobility trends of visitors are primary indicators of whether retailers will rise their popularity during the event. To confirm this we formulate a retail winners prediction task in the context of which we evaluate a set of geographic and mobility metrics. We find that the proximity to stadiums, the diversity of activity in the neighborhood, the nearby area sociability, as well as the probability of customer flows from and to event places such as stadiums and parks are all vital factors. Through supervised learning techniques we demonstrate that the success of businesses hinges on a combination of both geographic and mobility factors. Our results suggest that location-based social networks, where crowdsourced information about the dynamic interaction of users with urban spaces becomes publicly available, present an alternative medium to assess the economic impact of large scale events in a city.
The power of social media for the automated analysis of real-world events has been universally recognized @cite_11 . The large volumes of timely user-generated content in response to public events such as election campaigns allow the extraction of event insights not easily obtainable via alternative means @cite_18 @cite_13 . Social media users act as sensors that empower the development of real-time event detection methodologies @cite_19 @cite_16 . We follow the trends of employing social media for our analysis, and take advantage of location-based services data to automate the impact assessment of a major sports event.
@cite_18 @cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_11
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Using social media for political discourse is increasingly becoming common practice, especially around election time. Arguably, one of the most interesting aspects of this trend is the possibility of ''pulsing'' the public's opinion in near real-time and, thus, it has attracted the interest of many researchers as well as news organizations. Recently, it has been reported that predicting electoral outcomes from social media data is feasible, in fact it is quite simple to compute. Positive results have been reported in a few occasions, but without an analysis on what principle enables them. This, however, should be surprising given the significant differences in the demographics between likely voters and users of online social networks. This work aims to test the predictive power of social media metrics against several Senate races of the two recent US Congressional elections. We review the findings of other researchers and we try to duplicate their findings both in terms of data volume and sentiment analysis. Our research aim is to shed light on why predictions of electoral (or other social events) using social media might or might not be feasible. In this paper, we offer two conclusions and a proposal: First, we find that electoral predictions using the published research methods on Twitter data are not better than chance. Second, we reveal some major challenges that limit the predictability of election results through data from social media. We propose a set of standards that any theory aiming to predict elections (or other social events) using social media should follow. User-contributed Web data contains rich and diverse information about a variety of events in the physical world, such as shows, festivals, conferences and more. This information ranges from known event features (e.g., title, time, location) posted on event aggregation platforms (e.g., Last.fm events, EventBrite, Facebook events) to discussions and reactions related to events shared on different social media sites (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Flickr). In this paper, we focus on the challenge of automatically identifying user-contributed content for events that are planned and, therefore, known in advance, across different social media sites. We mine event aggregation platforms to extract event features, which are often noisy or missing. We use these features to develop query formulation strategies for retrieving content associated with an event on different social media sites. Further, we explore ways in which event content identified on one social media site can be used to retrieve additional relevant event content on other social media sites. We apply our strategies to a large set of user-contributed events, and analyze their effectiveness in retrieving relevant event content from Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. With the rapid development of Internet, new media, such as blogs, wikis, and social media, become a major platform for information dissemination. Numerous studies focus on event dissemination trend analysis for individual media platform, while very few works are conducted to study the dissemination characteristics in a cross-platform manner. In this work, we propose ESAP, a novel cross-platform approach to analyze the event dissemination trend between social network and search engine simultaneously. ESAP includes three models: an event popularity model based on hot word dynamic weight; a trend similarity model to measure the similarity of event popularity across different platforms over time; and an attention degree model to measure event public attention through time. Experimental results based on four real-world event dissemination datasets (two from Baidu and two from Weibo) produce several interesting findings and validate the effectiveness of ESAP in modeling and analyzing event dissemination trend between social network and search engine from different perspectives. Online social media are complementing and in some cases replacing person-to-person social interaction and redefining the diffusion of information. In particular, microblogs have become crucial grounds on which public relations, marketing, and political battles are fought. We demonstrate a web service that tracks political memes in Twitter and helps detect astroturfing, smear campaigns, and other misinformation in the context of U.S. political elections. We also present some cases of abusive behaviors uncovered by our service. Our web service is based on an extensible framework that will enable the real-time analysis of meme diffusion in social media by mining, visualizing, mapping, classifying, and modeling massive streams of public microblogging events. News and events are traditionally broadcasted in an “After-the-Fact” manner, where the masses react to news formulated by a group of professionals. However, the deluge of information and real-time online social media sites have significantly changed this information input-output cycle, allowing the masses to report real-time events around the world. Specifically, the use of Twitter has resulted in the creation of a digital wealth of knowledge that directly associates to such events. Although governments and industries acknowledge the value of extracting events from the TwitterSphere, unfortunately the sheer velocity and volume of tweets poses significant challenges to the desired event analysis. In this paper, we present our Geo and Temporal Association Creator (GTAC) which extracts structured representations of events from the Twitter stream. GTAC further supports event-level investigative analysis of social media data through interactively visualizing the event indicators (who, when, where, and what). Using GTAC, we are trying to create a near real-time analysis environment for analysts to identify event structures, geographical distributions, and key indicators of emerging events. Text data such as online news and microblogs bear valuable insights regarding important events and responses to such events. Events are inherently temporal, evolving over time. Existing visual text analysis systems have provided temporal views of changes based on topical themes extracted from text data. But few have associated topical themes with events that cause the changes. In this paper, we propose an interactive visual analytics system, LeadLine, to automatically identify meaningful events in news and social media data and support exploration of the events. To characterize events, LeadLine integrates topic modeling, event detection, and named entity recognition techniques to automatically extract information regarding the investigative 4 Ws: who, what, when, and where for each event. To further support analysis of the text corpora through events, LeadLine allows users to interactively examine meaningful events using the 4 Ws to develop an understanding of how and why. Through representing large-scale text corpora in the form of meaningful events, LeadLine provides a concise summary of the corpora. LeadLine also supports the construction of simple narratives through the exploration of events. To demonstrate the efficacy of LeadLine in identifying events and supporting exploration, two case studies were conducted using news and social media data. In recent years, there has been a growing trend to use publicly available social media sources within the field of journalism. Breaking news has tight reporting deadlines, measured in minutes not days, but content must still be checked and rumors verified. As such, journalists are looking at automated content analysis to prefilter large volumes of social media content prior to manual verification. This article describes a real-time social media analytics framework for journalists. We extend our previously published geoparsing approach to improve its scalability and efficiency. We develop and evaluate a novel approach to geosemantic feature extraction, classifying evidence in terms of situatedness, timeliness, confirmation, and validity. Our approach works for new unseen news topics. We report results from four experiments using five Twitter datasets crawled during different English-language news events. One of our datasets is the standard TREC 2012 microblog corpus. Our classification results are promising, with F1 scores varying by class from 0.64 to 0.92 for unseen event types. We lastly report results from two case studies during real-world news stories, showcasing different ways our system can assist journalists filter and cross-check content as they examine the trust and veracity of content and sources. The discovery of patterns and events in the physical world by analysis of multiple streams of sensor data can provide benefit to society in more than just surveillance applications by focusing on automated means for social scientists, anthropologists and marketing experts to detect macroscopic trends and changes in the general population. This goal complements analogous efforts in documenting trends in the digital world, such as those in social media monitoring. In this paper we show how the contents of a street webcam, processed with state-of-the-art deep networks, can provide information about patterns in clothing and their relation to weather information. In particular, we analyze a large time series of street webcam images, using a deep network trained for garment detection, and demonstrate how the garment distribution over time significantly correlates to weather and temporal patterns. Finally, we additionally provide a new and improved labelled dataset of garments for training and benchmarking purposes, reporting (58.19 , ) overall accuracy on the ACS test set, the best performance yet obtained. Social media services such as Twitter generate phenomenal volume of content for most real-world events on a daily basis. Digging through the noise and redundancy to understand the important aspects of the content is a very challenging task. We propose a search and summarization framework to extract relevant representative tweets from a time-ordered sample of tweets to generate a coherent and concise summary of an event. We introduce two topic models that take advantage of temporal correlation in the data to extract relevant tweets for summarization. The summarization framework has been evaluated using Twitter data on four real-world events. Evaluations are performed using Wikipedia articles on the events as well as using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with human readers (MTurkers). Both experiments show that the proposed models outperform traditional LDA and lead to informative summaries. Social media platforms such as Twitter garner significant attention from very large audiences in response to real-world events. Automatically establishing who is participating in information production or conversation around events can improve event content consumption, help expose the stakeholders in the event and their varied interests, and even help steer subsequent coverage of an event by journalists. In this paper, we take initial steps towards building an automatic classifier for user types on Twitter, focusing on three core user categories that are reflective of the information production and consumption processes around events: organizations, journalists media bloggers, and ordinary individuals. Exploration of the user categories on a range of events shows distinctive characteristics in terms of the proportion of each user type, as well as differences in the nature of content each shared around the events. Social media streams, such as Twitter, have shown themselves to be useful sources of real-time information about what is happening in the world. Automatic detection and tracking of events identified in these streams have a variety of real-world applications, e.g. identifying and automatically reporting road accidents for emergency services. However, to be useful, events need to be identified within the stream with a very low latency. This is challenging due to the high volume of posts within these social streams. In this paper, we propose a novel event detection approach that can both effectively detect events within social streams like Twitter and can scale to thousands of posts every second. Through experimentation on a large Twitter dataset, we show that our approach can process the equivalent to the full Twitter Firehose stream, while maintaining event detection accuracy and outperforming an alternative distributed event detection system. Social media services have become increasingly popular and their penetration is worldwide. Micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, allow users to express themselves, share their emotions and discuss their daily life affairs in real-time, covering a variety of different points of view and opinions, including political and event-related topics such as immigration, economic issues, tax policy or election campaigns. On the other hand, traditional methods tracking public opinion still heavily rely upon opinion polls, which are usually limited to small sample sizes and can incur in significant costs in terms of time and money. In this paper, we leverage state-of-the-art techniques of sentiment analysis for real-time political emotion tracking. In particular, we analyze mentions of personal names of 18 presidents in Latin America, and measure each political figure's effect in the emotions reflected on the social web. Social media websites provide a platform for anyone to describe significant events taking place in their lives in realtime. Currently, the majority of personal news and life events are published in a textual format, motivating information extraction systems that can provide a structured representations of major life events (weddings, graduation, etc. . . ). This paper demonstrates the feasibility of accurately extracting major life events. Our system extracts a fine-grained description of users’ life events based on their published tweets. We are optimistic that our system can help Twitter users more easily grasp information from users they take interest in following and also facilitate many downstream applications, for example realtime friend recommendation. Situation awareness plays an important role in disaster response and emergency management. Displaying real-time location-based social media messages along with videos, pictures, and hashtags during a disaster event could help first responders improve their situation awareness . A geo-targeted event observation (Geo) Viewer was developed for monitoring real-time social media messages in target areas with four major functions: (1) real-time display of geo-tagged tweets within the target area; (2) interactive mapping functions; (3) spatial, text, and temporal search functions using keywords, spatial boundaries, or dates; and (4) manual labeling and text-tagging of messages. Different from traditional web GIS maps, the user interface design of GeoViewer provides the interactive display of multimedia content and maps. The front-end user interface to visualize and query tweets is built with open source programming libraries using server-side MongoDB. GeoViewer is built for assisting emergency responses and disaster management tasks by tracking disaster event impacts, recovery activities, and residents’ needs in the target region. Live streaming platforms bring events from all around the world to people's computing devices. We conducted a mixed methods study including interviews (N = 42) and a survey (N = 223) to understand how people currently experience events using Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat Live Stories. We identified four dimensions that make remote event viewing engaging: immersion, immediacy, interaction, and sociality. We find that both live streams and the more curated event content found on Snapchat are immersive and immediate, yet Snapchat Live Stories enable quickly switching among different views of the event. Live streams, on the other hand, offer real time interaction and sociality in a way that Snapchat Live Stories do not. However, the interaction's impact depends on comment volume, comment content, and relationship between viewer and broadcaster. We describe how people experience events remotely using these social media, and identify design opportunities around detecting exciting content, leveraging multiple viewpoints, and enabling interactivity to create engaging user experiences for remotely participating in events. User-contributed messages on social media sites such as Twitter have emerged aspowerful, real-time means of information sharing on the Web. These short messages tend to reflect a variety of events in real time, making Twitter particularly well suited as a source of real-time event content. In this paper, we explore approaches for analyzing the stream of Twitter messages to distinguish between messages about real-world events andnon-event messages. Our approach relies on a rich family of aggregatestatistics of topically similar message clusters. Large-scale experiments over millions of Twitter messages show the effectiveness of our approach for surfacing real-world event content on Twitter. This paper presents the first criminological analysis of an online social reaction to a crime event of national significance, in particular the detection and propagation of cyberhate on social media following a terrorist attack. We take the Woolwich, London terrorist attack in 2013 as our event of interest and draw on Cohen’s process of warning, impact, inventory and reaction to delineate a sequence of incidents that come to constitute a series of deviant responses following the attack. This paper adds to contemporary debates in criminology and the study of hate crime in three ways: (1) it provides the first analysis of the escalation, duration, diffusion and de-escalation of cyberhate in social media following a terrorist event; (2) it applies Cohen’s work on action, reaction and amplification and the role of the traditional media to the online context and (3) it introduces and provides a case study in ‘computational criminology’. Social media channels such as Twitter have emerged as platforms for crowds to respond to public and televised events such as speeches and debates. However, the very large volume of responses presents challenges for attempts to extract sense from them. In this work, we present an analytical method based on joint statistical modeling of topical influences from the events and associated Twitter feeds. The model enables the auto-segmentation of the events and the characterization of tweets into two categories: (1) episodic tweets that respond specifically to the content in the segmentsof the events, and (2) steady tweets that respond generally about the events. By applying our method to two large sets of tweets in response to President Obama's speech on the Middle East in May 2011 and a Republican Primary debate in September 2011, we present what these tweets were about. We also reveal the nature and magnitude of the influences of the event on the tweets over its timeline. In a user study, we further show that users find the topics and the episodic tweets discovered by our method to be of higher quality and more interesting as compared to the state-of-the-art, with improvements in the range of 18-41 . In recent years, microblogs have become an important source for reporting real-world events. A real-world occurrence reported in microblogs is also called a social event. Social events may hold critical materials that describe the situations during a crisis. In real applications, such as crisis management and decision making, monitoring the critical events over social streams will enable watch officers to analyze a whole situation that is a composite event, and make the right decision based on the detailed contexts such as what is happening, where an event is happening, and who are involved. Although there has been significant research effort on detecting a target event in social networks based on a single source, in crisis, we often want to analyze the composite events contributed by different social users. So far, the problem of integrating ambiguous views from different users is not well investigated. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework to detect composite social events over streams, which fully exploits the information of social data over multiple dimensions. Specifically, we first propose a graphical model called location-time constrained topic (LTT) to capture the content, time, and location of social messages. Using LTT, a social message is represented as a probability distribution over a set of topics by inference, and the similarity between two messages is measured by the distance between their distributions. Then, the events are identified by conducting efficient similarity joins over social media streams. To accelerate the similarity join, we also propose a variable dimensional extendible hash over social streams. We have conducted extensive experiments to prove the high effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Microblogging as a new form of communication on Internet, has attracted the attention from researchers recently. Relying the real-time and conversational properties of microblogging, its users update their statuses and share experience within their the social network. Those characteristics also make microblogging an important tool for users to share or discuss real world events such as earth quake or sport game. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible solution to detect and recognize real-time events from sport games based on analyzing the messages posted on microblogging services. We take Twitter as the experiment platform and collect a large-scale dataset of Twitter messages that are called tweets for 18 prominent sport games covering four types of sports in 2011. We also collect corresponding sport videos for those games. The proposed solution applies moving-threshold burst detection on the volume of tweets to detect highlights in sport games. A tf-idf-based weighting method is applied on the tweets within detected highlights for semantic extraction. According to the experiments we perform on the tweet and video datasets, we find that the proposed methods can achieve competent performance in sport event detection and recognition. Besides, our method can find non pre-defined tidbits that are difficult to detect in previous works.