Social Media Research Themes

A couple of weeks ago, over at LinkedIn Rob Van Alphen was looking for social media research/thesis topics and asked the community for possible suggestions. I decided to share my reply here and I hope that this would inspire other graduate students who are looking for possible thesis topics. Please feel free to add to the following list by posting your suggestions in the comments. Here is an excerpt from my reply:

There are many interesting areas of research in social media. Following are a few starting points you might wish to look at:

1. Opinion/Sentiment retrieval (Also look at TREC papers from last two blog tracks)
2. Blog feed distillation (Finding important/relevant blogs for a topic)
3. Community detection: Partitioning social networks and blog graphs into communities (tech, politics games etc)
4. Temporal data mining: Both for interesting event detection/buzz/trend analysis and evolutionary community detection/clustering.
5. Spam detection: Also look into adversarial challenges
6. Classification: There are many challenges in classifying blogs/social media content into different "topics" or "categories"
7. Feed indexing: how do you ensure the freshness of your index. The timeliness of the results etc matter a whole lot in social media.
8. NLP and entity detection from noisy unstructured text that is common in social media settings.
9. Microblogs and real time data from short updates like twitter and friendfeed.
10. Advertising possibilities: research on better advertising models for social media.
11. Better image search: combine tagging information with Image processing for improved image search.
12. Social recommendation systems like netflix,last.fm

There are a number of papers and conferences that you might wish to follow up on. Best place to start would be the ICWSM conference papers. There are also several interesting papers from social sciences and psychology perspectives as well (for example, perception of self vs. other's perception of your profile on facebook). This is an exciting field and you can do a lot of cool stuff. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you are a grad student and are starting work in this area. And if you are a UMBC student (grads/undergrads) interested in social media, the eBiquity research group is Hiring!

Comments

[Mary McGlohon]

Great list! I'll refer this to students who ask about "what's going on".

Related to "adversarial challenges", I would say privacy issues are another hot topic. (Every so often there's some debacle about being able to find out about people based on information on their friends' Facebook profiles.)

[Akshay Java]

Yep! Thats a good point. I missed privacy perhaps because I dont consider it to be such a big deal :-P I think that the credit card companies and data gathering firms like choicepoint have a lot more sensitive data that people should worry more about! In any case privacy and k anonymity in social networks are great research topics.