The Department of Media and Communication held the 2015 Workshop on Computational Communication Research (CCR2015) on June 18-20.  Through five intensive sessions, the Workshop introduced a variety of computational methods, tools, and algorithms to more than 50 faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, PhD and Master’s students, and media professionals from the U.S., Europe, Singapore, Bangladesh, Mainland China and Hong Kong. Internationally renowned methodologists George Barnett (University of Californian at Davis) and Frank Boster (Michigan State University) came to observe some of the sessions.
 
Prof. Jonathan Zhu (founder of Web Mining Lab) and three other members of the Lab, including Dr. Jie Qin (faculty member at Savannah College of Arts and Design Hong Kong), Dr. Hai Liang (post-doctoral fellow at Hong Kong University) and Dr. Zhenzhen Wang (post-doctoral researcher at CityU) delivered lectures on how to design innovative, rigorous and feasible CCR studies, how to collect and store online data, how to process and mine text data, how to analyze and visualize CCR data, along with exemplar studies and hands-on practices using R programming language.
 
CCR2015 is the second computational workshop the Department has offered, with the first on Web Mining in May 2014 (CCR2014). In addition to the Department, CCR2015 was supported by the Global China Studies Project of College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the 2015-16 UGC Knowledge Transfer Earmarked Fund.
 
Jonathan Zhu