CS595
Machine Learning and Social Media
Lecture 1: Overview
Aron Culotta
Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
Social media is ...
Social media is ...
- media produced in a decentralized way
- generated by users
- shared
- non-professional?
- high volume
- immediate
A large portion of the world's conversations are conducted in public.
Is there anything useful in this chatter?
Is there anything useful in this chatter...other than marketing?
How does this 
How does this become useful?
Machine Learning
- Algorithms to detect patterns in data
- Combines statistics and computer science
- CS584 Machine Learning
Machine Learning
Key tasks
- Classification: Assign a label to an object
- Regression: Assign a real number to an object
- Clustering: Group similar objects
Social Network Analysis
- study of the relationship between objects
- Core tasks:
- Community detection
- Link prediction
- Spread of influence
This Course
- Practitioner's overview of machine learning and SNA
- fundamentals covered in other classes
- Survey of cutting edge research in this area
- Hands-on experience doing social media analysis