Invited Talk by Dr. Niloy Ganguly on Extracting and Utilizing Information from Microblogs during Disaster

Title: Extracting and Utilizing Information from Microblogs during Disaster
Speaker: Dr. Niloy Ganguly
Host Faculty: Dr. Srijith P.K.
Room No: Auditorium, academic block A.
Time: 12:00

Abstract:

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter provide rapid access to situation-sensitive information that people post during mass convergence events such as natural or man-made disasters. When a disaster happens, responders to disasters use such information obtained from microblogging sites to plan and respond to the needs of people located in disaster areas. However, situational information is immersed among hundreds of thousands of tweets, mostly containing sentiments and opinion of the masses, that are posted during such events. Further, these large volume of situational tweet streams are scattered across various humanitarian categories like ‘infrastructure damage’, ‘missing or found people’, ‘shelter and service’, ‘volunteer service’ etc. These humanitarian categories contain information about various small scale sub-events like ‘airport shut’, ‘building collapse’ etc. To effectively utilize microblogging sites during disaster events, it is necessary to (i) extract the situational information from among the large amounts of sentiment and opinion, (ii) identify various humanitarian categories and small scale sub-events from situational tweet stream, and (iii) summarize the situational information in real time, to help decision making processes when time is critical. In this work, we have proposed different solutions to address above mentioned challenges.

Speaker Bio:

Niloy Ganguly is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He has received his PhD from Bengal Engineering and Science University, Calcutta, India and his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur. He has been a post-doctoral fellow in Technical University of Dresden, Germany where he has worked in the EU-funded project Biology-Inspired Techniques for Self-Organization in Dynamic Networks (BISON).

Ganguly presently focuses on different aspects of Online Social Networks (OSN), urban and mobile computing. His primary contributions to the domain of OSN include understanding the importance of link-farming and discovering experts in OSN as well as modeling opinion dynamics over social network. He has also contributed to various theoretical issues related to dynamical large networks often termed as complex networks. In this line, he has been instrumental in organizing the workshop series Dynamics On and Of Complex Networks in European Conference on Complex Systems and several complex system related conferences.

He has published around 150 papers in international conferences and journals. He has also edited a book on Complex Networks published by Birkhauser, Boston. He currently publishes in various top ranking international journals and conferences including: WWW, KDD, SIGIR, IJCAI, CIKM, ICDM, ICWSM, CSCW, ACL, EMNLP, INFOCOM, Euro Physics Letters, Physical Review E, ACM and IEEE Transactions. He also leads a very active research group – named CNeRG: Complex Network Research Group.

Dates:
Thursday, December 14, 2017 - 12:00