Generating neighborhood guides from social media data

Imagine you’re traveling to a new city and trying to rent a place to stay. What neighborhood will you stay in? What area feels right for you? I built neighborhood guides based on the social media that people are posting there already. PhD Thesis, Proposal, the much more interesting talk, and the ICWSM 2016 Citylab workshop paper.

Why do people geotag?

People post their locations on their tweets, checkins, photos - why? We went to investigate that, and ended up finding some other weird nuggets in the world of geotagging today. Paper called “State of the Geotags: Motivations and Recent Changes” at ICWSM 2017.
Paper locally - On AAAI

Our House, in the Middle of Our Tweets

If you have someone’s geotagged tweet stream, how well can you find their home? About 80% of people within 1km. At ICWSM 2016.
Paper locally - On AAAI

Other related social-media-for-understanding-cities projects

Using Social Media Data to Understand Cities, from the Big Data and Urban Informatics Workshop, August 2014.

Finding a City’s Activity Bubbles in Geotagged Social Media, at the HCOMP 2014 “Citizen+X” Workshop on Volunteer-Based Crowdsourcing in Science, Public Health, and Government, November 2014.

Getting Users' Attention in Web Apps in Likable, Minimally Annoying Ways

I suppose that title’s a bit self explanatory. Making the case for glowing shadows instead of popups. In CHI 2016. Paper locally - On ACM DL

Mailing Archived Emails as Postcards

Why do people save and treasure their old letters but not their old emails? An investigation through interviews and a technology probe. In CHI 2016. Paper locally - On ACM DL

Gimlets: making machine learning easier for sensor data

Published in ACM TIIS 2017 as “Making Machine Learning Applications for Time-Series Sensor Data Graphical and Interactive.” Paper locally - On ACM DL

PVT: Android app to assess sleepiness

I just wrote code for this one; a bunch of folks led by Matthew Kay turned it into a study and paper. In Pervasive Health 2013. Paper locally - On IEEE

Radiohead or Horse_Ebooks?

Alas, @horse_ebooks is no longer a seller of equine .epubs, but for a while it was one of the most wonderfully cryptic things on the internet. This is my little tribute to both the old horse and an equally cryptic band. Test your own knowledge.

Sour Cream - semantic parsing for cooking recipes

Undergraduate thesis, advised by Noah A. Smith. Paper locally - At CMU