James Caverlee

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University

TAMU infolab
TEES Center for the Study of Digital Libraries

403 H.R. Bright Building
College Station, TX 77843-3112
[last_name] (at) cse.tamu.edu

CAREER: Real-Time Crowd-Oriented Search and Computation Systems

National Science Foundation Award Number IIS 1149383
CAREER: Real-Time Crowd-Oriented Search and Computation Systems
PI: James Caverlee
Duration: February 2012 - January 2018

Project Overview

This project is focused on highly-dynamic, ad-hoc crowd formation in emerging real-time socio-computational systems. While long-lived communities have been one of the key organizing principles of Web-based systems, these crowds are dynamically formed and potentially short-lived, often with only implicit signals of their formation and evolution. The goal of this research project is to develop the framework, algorithms, and systems for lightweight crowd-oriented search and computation so that stakeholders can distill high-quality information from bursty social systems and actively engage with the crowds generating this information.

Distilling high-quality information from bursty social systems and actively engaging with the crowds generating this information will result in improved real-time decision-making, impacting a wide range of stakeholders from areas such as epidemiology, law enforcement, government, finance, politics, among many others.


Publications


Participants

  • James Caverlee, PI

Project Alumni

  • Cheng Cao (PhD 2017)
  • Hancheng Ge (PhD 2017)
  • Haokai Lu (PhD 2017)
  • Wei Niu (PhD 2017)
  • Jared Russell (Undergrad 20XX)
  • Nazif Ali (Undergrad 20XX)
  • Zhiyuan Cheng (PhD 2014)
  • Krishna Kamath (PhD 2013)
  • Zhijiao Liu (MS 2015)
  • Himanshu Barthwal (MS 2015)
  • Sindhuja Venkatash (MS 2014)
  • Vandana Bachini (MS 2013)
  • Yuan Liang (MS 2013)
  • Jeff McGee (MS 2013)
  • Aaron Moore
  • Davis Land
  • Jason Bolden, NSF REU Summer 2012, (BS with Honors, 2013)
  • Kalil Armstrong NSF REU Summer 2012

Education and Outreach

  • Elements of the research project have been incorporated into topics and projects in the undergraduate and graduate information retrieval courses (CSCE 470, CSCE 670) and a new data science course (CSCE 489).
  • REU Students Jason Bolden (pic, pic) and Kalil Armstrong (pic) participated in the 2012 end-of-summer Texas A&M Summer REU research workshop. Jason Bolden ultimately finished his undergraduate thesis on aspects of this project as part of the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program.
  • Hour-long "mini-tutorial" to 41 elementary school children from Dunbar Elementary (Lufkin ISD), January 29, 2013 Local NBC Coverage
  • Two talks to visiting students from Jimmy Carter Early College High School (La Joya ISD) November 29, 2012 (~30 students) and November 21, 2013 (~50 students)
  • The Power of Social Media, Feature in TAMU Engineering Magazine (2012 issue)
  • Invited talks at Texas State (San Marcos)'s REU Program (July 12, 2012 and July 25, 2013), Houghton College (April 16, 2013), Penn State University (May 9, 2013), CollaborateCom Panel Discussion (October 22, 2013), USAA TechX (October 25, 2013), and KredibleNet Workshop on Reputation, Trust, and Authority at Stanford (October 18, 2013).
  • Coding Gig Hackathon. First event: October 13, 2012; Second event: September 6, 2013.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number IIS-1149383. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.