Shishuo Xu successfully defended her PhD Thesis

Shishuo Xu has successfully defended her disseration entitled "Sensing and Detecting Small-scale Events using Geosocial Media Data (opens in new window) " on January 8, 2020. In her thesis, spatial-temporal-semantic approaches are proposed to measure spatiotemporal patterns of posts and users of social media platforms to capture abnormal human movement, and analyze the content of associated posts to mine the reasons driving the movement. A variety of techniques including machine learning, natural language processing, and spatiotemporal analysis are adopted to realize effective detection. Based on one-year Twitter data collected in Toronto, 2014 Toronto International Film Festival and traffic anomaly detection are selected as two case studies to evaluate the performance of proposed approaches. Through comparing with the ground truth data, the result reveals that more than 80% of the detected events do refer to real-world events, which illustrates the feasibility and efficiency of proposed approaches.

Congratulations Shishuo!