Radu-Andrei Negoescu successfully defended his PhD thesis

On June first, 2011, Radu-Andrei Negoescu successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Modeling and Understanding Communities in Online Social Media using Probabilistic Methods".

Abstract:

The amount of multimedia content is on a constant increase, and people interact with each other and with content on a daily basis through social media systems.
The goal of this thesis was to model and understand emerging online communities that revolve around multimedia content, more specifically photos, by using large-scale data and probabilistic models in a quantitative approach.
The disertation has four contributions. First, using data from two online photo management systems, this thesis examined different aspects of the behavior of users of these systems pertaining to the uploading and sharing of photos with other users and online groups.
Second, probabilistic topic models were used to model online entities, such as users and groups of users, and the new proposed representations were shown to be useful for further understanding such entities, as well as to have practical applications in search and recommendation scenarios.
Third, by jointly modeling users from two different social photo systems, it was shown that differences at the level of vocabulary exist, and different sharing behaviors can be observed.
Finally, by modeling online user groups as entities in a topic-based model, hyper-communities were discovered in an automatic fashion based on various topic-based representations.
These hyper-communities were shown, both through an objective and a subjective evaluation with a number of users, to be generally homogeneous, and therefore likely to constitute a viable exploration technique for online communities.

Publications:

R. A. Negoescu and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Analyzing Flickr Groups,'' in CIVR '08: Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Image and Video Retrieval, 2008.
R. A. Negoescu and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Topickr: Flickr Groups and Users Reloaded,'' in MM '08: Proc. of the 16th ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia, 2008.
R. A. Negoescu, B. Adams, D. Phung, S. Venkatesh, and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Flickr Hypergroups,'' in MM '09: Proc. of the 17th ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia, 2009.
R. A. Negoescu, A. C. Loui, and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Kodak Moments and Flickr Diamonds: how Users Shape Large-scale Media,'' in MM'10: Proc. of the 18th ACM Intl. Conf. on Multimedia, 2010.
R. A. Negoescu and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Modeling Flickr Communities Through Probabilistic Topic-Based Analysis,'' IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 399-416, 2010.
R. A. Negoescu and D. Gatica-Perez, ``Flickr Groups: Multimedia Communities for Multimedia Analysis,''  in: Internet Multimedia Search and Mining, Bentham Science Publishers, in press.

The full list can be found on the Idiap publications portal