Keynote Speakers

Mor Naaman

Rutgers University SMIL, Mahaya, Inc.

It’s Time for Events: Telling the World's Stories from Social Media
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An overwhelming amount of information from real-world events is shared by individuals through social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. These events range from major global events like an uprising or an earthquake, to local events and emergencies such as a fire or a parade; from international media events like the Oscar's, to events that enjoy little media coverage such as a conference or a music concert. This shared media represents an important part of our society, culture and history. At the same time, this social media event content is currently fragmented across services, hard to find, and often difficult to consume due to its sheer scale. Our work tackles three critical challenges in making social media information about events accessible and usable: 1) the detection of events in social media content, 2) Identification and ranking of content relevant to an event across social media sites, and 3) organization and presentation of event data to allow users to effectively explore, analyze, and experience an event through its social media content. Our work results in new tools that allow multiple stakeholders, such as journalists, first responders, researchers, policy makers and the general public, to see and understand the stories of world, as told in social media.

Diane Kelly

Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Contours and Convergence (KSJ Award Talk)
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We are happy to inform you that the BCS/ BCS IRSG Karen Spärck-Jones Award Panel has decided to make the Award for 2012 to Diane Kelly. In making the BCS/ BCS IRSG Karen Spärck-Jones Award for 2012, the Panel strongly recognizes that Diane has made important contributions to: the analysis of information seeking behaviors, and to the development of new experimental methods and systems to support information seeking and analysis.

Diane has made several other important contributions to user modeling using implicit indicators of relevance, the development and analysis of interfaces to elicit richer statements of interest, and new methodologies for designing and evaluating interactive retrieval systems. Her strong user-oriented work views users-as-people with cognitive tasks.