From 16:00 to 17:30 on November 27, 2019, MARI held the 4th Interdisciplinary Academic Salon in the digital reading seminar area on the third floor of the library. Prof. Ying Sha, from College of Informatics, HZAU is invited to share the research on the Collection, Analysis and Visualization of Social Media Big Data. Prof. Debin Zhang from College of Public Administration and Hang Xiong from College of Economics & Management are invited to serve as commentators. The teachers and students from College of Economics & Management and College of Economics actively participated in the activity.

At first, Prof. Ying Sha elaborated on "what is social computing", "analysis of social media big data", "acquisition of social media big data", and "visualization of social media big data". He pointed out that as a data intensive science, social computing has had a great impact on the depth, breadth and scale of data collection and analysis. As a new computing paradigm, it has produced a new interdisciplinary research and application field. In the modern network age, various social media and their complex interactions have become the main research objects of social computing, and social network provides a unified model basis for various data expression and theoretical analysis based on society. In addition, Prof. Ying Sha also talked about the significance, challenges and main tasks of social network analysis. Social network data is the data foundation and premise of social network analysis. Currently, there are three collection technologies for social media data acquisition: based on the official API; based on simulated Ajax; based on browser test components. Finally, Prof. Ying Sha took social network anomaly detection as an example to explain social media visualization.

In the review section, Prof. Debin Zhang combined with his own feelings and remarked that with the improvement of computing, collection and storage capacity, both theory and tools are constantly evolving and gradually applied to different research fields. Prof. Hang Xiong put forward the limitations of big data research from causality and pointed out that with the deepening of economic and social research, the cooperation between social researchers and natural researchers is more important. At last, Prof. Hang Xiong hoped that Prof. Ying Sha and MARI could have further academic exchanges and cooperation in the future.

Written by Lidong Zhao