Jonathan Visited to PHBS in Shenzhen
Jonathan Zhu paid an intensive visit to Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS) on Sept 25, 2019, where he met half a dozen senior and junior faculty members individually, each for half-hour long, and gave a seminar talk to faculty and graduate students on “Computational approaches to communication research: theory, methods, and applications”.
Located in Shenzhen University Zone, PHBS houses a body of highly international faculty and students, with all teaching and learning conducted in English. It also runs an overseas campus in Oxford, which is likely to be the first of the kind in China. Of the graduate programs is an MA in Financial Journalism, whose faculty members and students working on a range of topics overlapped with those of Web Mining Lab.
“Two members of our Lab graduated from your program, and we used to work with Dr. Kai Lei and his ICNLab of School of Electronic and Computer Engineering on your campus,” said Jonathan at the beginning of his talk, “the visit today opens a new channel and a new direction of collaborations between us”. In addition to computational communication research, Web Mining Lab’s mapping studies of SSCI publications have also attracted keen interests from PHBS scholars.
Six papers accepted for ICA 2019
The 69th Annual ICA conference will be held on May 24-28, 2019 in Washington DC, US. Six papers by lab members are selected for presentation on the coming conference, which has an acceptance rate of 39.4% this year. The titles of the papers are listed below:
- Hao, Q., & Peng, T. Q. Two Applications of Statistical Relational Learning: Fake News Detection and Congress Voting Patterns. (Computational Methods Interest Group)
- Wang, X. H., Chen, L., Shi, J. Y., & Peng, T. Q. What makes cancer information viral on social media? (Communication & Technology Division)
- Liang, H., Tang, G., Lee, F.L.F. Normalizing Swearing Online: An Unintended Consequence of a Large-Scale Political Movement in Hong Kong. (Computational Methods Interest Group)
- Chen, H. X. User’s preference for mobile display orientation across media domains. (Media Communication Interest Group)
- Guan, L., Liang, H., & Zhu, J. J. H. Predicting Reposting Latency of News Content in Social Media: A Focus on Issue Attention, Temporal Usage Pattern, and Information Redundancy. (Computational Methods Interest Group)
- Zhou, Y. & Zhu, J. J. H. How online health groups help you lose weight: The role of social influence and support exchange. (Health communication)
One paper accepted by PacificVis 2019
A paper, entitled “Visual Analytics of Dynamic Interplay Between Behaviors in MMORPGs”, has recently been accepted for publication and presentation at PacificVis 2019. Two members of the Web Mining Lab, Dr. Winson Peng, and Mr. Ji Lan, participated in this study.
They work with a group of computer scientists at Zhejiang University to develop a visual analytic system which enables users to study the dynamic interplay between players’ purchase and communication behaviors in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) and investigate how local and global social structures among game players will contribute to such interplay.
Dr. Winson Peng is now an associate professor at Michigan State University. Mr. Ji Lan is now a joint PhD student co-supervised by Prof. Jonathan Zhu at City University of Hong Kong and Dr. Yingcai Wu at Zhejiang University.
PacificVis is an IEEE sponsored international visualization symposium, which is also a recommended international conference in Computer Graphics and Multimedia by China Computer Federation. The Pacific Visualization 2019 will be held in Bangkok, Thailand from April 23 to 26, 2019.
Retooling Workshop for MACNM Alumni kicked off
The Workshop, officially debuted as “MACNM Computational Workshop”, kicked off on Jan. 5, 2019 and continued on Jan. 6, 12, and 13 in Run Run Shaw Creative Media Center of City University of Hong Kong. Sponsored by the Centre for Communication Research (CCR) and Web Mining Lab of Department of Media and Communication, the Workshop aims primarily to serve graduates of MACNM to learn latest knowledge and skills of media analytics.
Launched in 1998, MACNM was the first graduate program on new media in Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific. Over 1,000 students have graduated from the cutting-edge program over the last two decades. However, many of them had not been exposed to big data, machine learning, and other cloud computational techniques until very recently when MACNM offered a Media Data Analytics Stream. To fill the gap, Prof. Jonathan Zhu, director of CCR and founder of MACNM, organized the Workshop to help MACNM alumni to retool themselves.
The 4-day Workshop covers topics ranging from Python Programming, Web Scraping, Text Mining, User Profiling, Online Experiment, Social Network Analysis, and Data Visualization, taught by PhD students of Web Mining Lab, including Lu Guan, Zhicong Chen, and Ji Lan, and their supervisor Jonathan Zhu, respectively.
The Workshop is conducted in two modes, offline and online. The offline sessions attract several dozen MACNM alumni from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, who work for print media, TV stations, social media, and a variety of start-up tech firms. The online sessions are live broadcast to the world, with MACNM alumni viewers interacting with the teaching team through instant messenger.
All teaching materials, including lecture videos, are accessible at Web Mining Lab website.
Lu and Yixin each received a grant from S-tech Research Assistance Plan
Lab members Lu Guan and Yinxin Zhou were funded, respectively, for their research proposals on “Personal curation strategy: How do social media users select and process information under the age of information overload” and “Mining Temporal Patterns of Online User Behavior: Construction, Validation, and Applications ” from the 2018 S-Tech Research Assistance Plan – Internet Communication Project. The project is established by a collaboration scheme among Tencent Research Institute, Computational Communication Research Centre at Nanjing University and Chinese Computational Communication Research Association.
The S-Tech Plan supports Internet communication studies. This year the Plan chooses to fund 6 doctoral theses, with each being funded with CNY10,000.
News and Events
- Jan 22, Eleven papers accepted for ICA 2020
- Jan 21, Jonathan and Xiaofan Spoke at the First Computational Workshop at Tohoku University, Japan
- Oct 31, One paper accepted by NetSci-X 2020
- Sep 27, Jonathan Visited to PHBS in Shenzhen
- Sep 25, Lab Members Participated in CCR Panel at SMP 2019
- May 25, Paper on mobile health apps published
- May 07, Lingfei Wu accepts faculty position at University of Pittsburgh
- Apr 17, Special issue on computational social science (CSS) published at Asian Journal of Communication
- Apr 09, Paper on user analytics method goes online
- Feb 28, Kevin Han of ISU visited Web Lab
- Feb 20, Dr. Toriumi of Tokyo visited the Lab
- Jan 19, Six papers accepted for ICA 2019
- Jan 08, One paper accepted by PacificVis 2019
- Jan 05, Retooling Workshop for MACNM Alumni kicked off
- Dec 19, Lu and Yixin each received a grant from S-tech Research Assistance Plan
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