Getting to the Meat of the Tweet: Applying Big Data Analytics to Social Media Data, Hosted by Opera Solutions

Facebook logs 695 status updates per second and Foursquare tallied more than 381 million check-ins in 2010. Over 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and Twitter’s 170 million users send 95 million tweets each day.
As mind-boggling as the numbers sound, the data being produced through social media is only going to continue to grow exponentially, meaning the Social Media Scientist may arguably become the hottest new position in tech this year. Algorithms to power recommendation and suggestion engines, sentiment analysis and natural language processing, and methods for affecting behavioral change are all data-driven objectives that smart social media companies should be (and many are) setting their sights on, in an effort to both enhance their users’ experiences and to effectively monetize their business.

We’ve assembled a panel of social media experts and data analytics professionals, as well as academics (including an MIT professor of neuroscience), to discuss:

• Can the models that are currently being used to tackle Big Data challenges in corporate America—best represented by a combination of machine learning and human intelligence—be applied to social media data?
   
• What do scientists know about how the brain triggers the need to share and how does social media impact the decisions we make?
   
• What can we do to clean up the messy, messy datasets provided by social media APIs? Are APIs the best way to obtain social media data, or is scraping data more effective?
   
• Marketers have been the first to recognize and embrace social media’s usefulness, but now new applications are popping up, such as stock price prediction and tracking down fraudsters. What other areas and industries will be the next to benefit from social media data analysis?
   

Speakers:

• Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Inventor and Chief Scientist, hakiaand SENSEnews
  

• Tony Jebara, co-founder, Sense Networks

• Sebastian Seung, Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics, MIT

•   Hilary Mason, data scientist, bit.ly

• JamieDaves, founder, Benefull.org

• Moderator: Jessica Vascellaro, Deputy Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal