As we enter the age of social networks, social media has been expanding rapidly, leading to a massive amount of user-generated data. In the social media and mobile intelligence group, we strive to develop computer algorithms that can learn about and adapt to these rapidly evolving sources of big data.

Many new and exciting research topics are now enter the center stage. Social network analytics involve the rapid analysis of user-generated SNS content (blogs, tweets, microblogs, etc.), so that enterprises can enjoy deep intelligence on the implicit user feedbacks related to products, social events, and society. The spread of information via social media challenges our knowledge of network science and information diffusion, and provides new opportunities for the understanding of diseases, natural disasters, and information. The growth of crowdsourcing, where knowledge can be harvested from the masses, gives rise to new ways to build intelligent machines.

At the same time, mobile computing is truly becoming pervasive in our everyday lives, and at the same time, poses new challenges for research on location-based computing, activity recognition and intention detection, data mining, machine learning, man-machine interaction and artificial intelligence. In our research, we tackle a broad cross-section of mobile sensing, information retrieval, and data mining challenges.

Our research topics encompass but are not limited to:

• How do social communities evolve? How information diffuses in social networks. Social behavior and network structure modeling. Identification of authoritative or influential authors.
• How do we overcome information overload and provide a rich and coherent user experience?
• How do we deal with unreliable and often conflicting information?
• How do we protect user privacy?
• How do we fuse signals from sensors such as GPS, Wi-Fi, RFID, and other technologies to provide better location-based services?
• How do we exploit social media, social networks and mobile computing platforms to provide community services and a better living environment?
• What can we achieve with human computation based on massive crowd-sourcing?
• How do we provide next-generation of health services and clean energy while reducing traffic and pollution with the help of mobile social computing?
• How do we design novel context modeling techniques for online and mobile recommendation systems?