Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, Social Media and Memes

As a PhD student, I’m keen to discover the latest academic research, which often happens at conferences. Although my main area of research is within marketing, my specialist area is social media. This year I stumbled over the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. In case, like me, you didn’t know, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is a major international organisation focused on ‘Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession’. Their members include Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and many of the computing great and good. They hold 170 conferences a year and have 37 Special Interest Groups, including Hypertext and Social Media.

Academic research source: ACM Digital Library

They also have a Digital Library that contains a wealth of significant academic articles about fake news, analysing Twitter data, bots and big data, privacy and artificial intelligence, as well as every aspect of applied…

A report from the 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Oxford, Spring 2015

Over four days in Oxford, the 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) took place, at the Mathematical Institute. The event sponsors include Facebook and Yahoo and it’s not a huge conference, just over 250 researchers in computer science and social science who gather to “share knowledge, discuss ideas, exchange information, and learn about cutting-edge research in diverse fields with the common theme of online social media.” I’d stumbled upon the conference whilst reading articles for my PhD. The conference is often in far flung locations (2016 it’s Cologne, 2017 it could be Montreal, Doha or Seattle) and discovered it was taking place in the UK. I managed to attend just one day and sat through 20 presentations. Here’s what I discovered.

Beware of trolls

Justin Cheng of Stanford University and others are researching ‘Antisocial…