Cecilia Mascolo
R(w)SM Reading Group, June 11th, 2-3:30pm, Seminar Room, Sociology
Bio
Cecilia Mascolo is Professor of Mobile Systems in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge in 2008, she was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. She holds a PhD and an MSc degree from the University of Bologna.
She specializes on optimizing mobile phone applications and understanding behaviour from mobile phone sensors and data. Her wider research interests are in human mobility modelling, mobile and sensor systems and networking and spatio-temporal data analysis. She has published in a number of top tier conferences and journals in the area, and her investigator experience spans more than twenty projects funded by EPSRC, MRC, EU, Google, Intel, Microsoft and Samsung. She has served as organizing and programme committee member of over fifty mobile, sensor systems and networking conferences and workshops. She sits on the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing, Pervasive Computing, Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.
Presentation overview
Research with geo-social network data
In this talk, I will describe the potential and our effort in researching user behaviour with geo-social network data. I will first introduce the various types of data we use, then I will describe a number of projects we have worked on which involve for example understanding user mobility with this data, group activity, the relationship of topics and text with geography, and automatic event detection. I will conclude discussing the potential evolution of this type of data through the use of some more powerful phone sensors.
Key reading
Noulas, Anastasios, Salvatore Scellato, Cecilia Mascolo, and Massimiliano Pontil. 2011. “An Empirical Study of Geographic User Activity Patterns in Foursquare.” In Proceedings of Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011).
Supplementary readings
Falcone, Deborah, Cecilia Mascolo, Carmela Comito, Domenico Talia, and Jon Crowcroft. 2014. “What Is This Place? Inferring Place Categories through User Patterns Identification in Geo-Tagged Tweets.” in Proceedings of International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE 2014).
Georgiev, Petko, Anastasios Noulas, and Cecilia Mascolo. 2014. “The Call of the Crowd: Event Participation in Location-Based Social Services.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2014).
Brown, Chloë, Neal Lathia, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, and Vincent Blondel. 2014. “Group Colocation Behavior in Technological Social Networks.” PLoS ONE.