Jonathan Zhu visited MSR, one of the largest software research firms in the world, for a week between 11 and 15 March as an MSR Visiting Researcher. At MSR Asia-Pacific headquarters in Beijing, he spent most of the time working with Dr. Shixia Liu, Dr. Yingcai Wu, and other members of data visualization group on an ongoing project on issue dynamics on social media, which has already generated an article published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, a leading journal on visualization. He also met three other teams working on different aspects of social media and gave a guest talk on social science approaches to social media with ongoing and planned projects at his Web Mining Lab as illustrations.  

 

“The visit has opened up a number of new opportunities for joint studies, doctoral student interns, and other opportunities,” Prof. Zhu reflected.  “What I have seen and heard at MSR all suggests that the availability of social media data and the advent of computing technology have made it possible to address many of the long-standing issues in social sciences in general and communication in particular. Interdisciplinary collaboration between information scientists and social scientists are the way to go.”