ONR Social Media Conference

Right before Christmas I headed out to San Jose for a conference on social media hosted by the Office of Naval Research.  It was an interesting cross section of government research on social media and comercial social media companies that provided either  social media apps (Facebook, Google+, Yahoo) or analytics (Topsy, Radian6, SAS).  There was some fascinating research being done and some good debates on privacy implications.  It was encouraging to see the open dialogue happening – although I would not say that everyone was in agreement.

We gave a talk on how the “geo” attributes of social media streams can be leveraged to help analysis and provide better context.  The general theme was how we use location as a common thread to tie together multiple disparate data sets.   One of the toughest things with social media is putting it into a broader context.  The presentation below covers some of the examples we gave of how this can be helpful in a variety of scenarios.

Lots of great presentations although the coolest demonstration of the day did not involve social media.  Affectiva showed off a tool for detecting the heart rate and breathing for users looking at a Webcam. The heart rate was live updating on the screen as the users in Webcam responded to what was on their screen.  Minority report is closer than we think…