Blog Posts

Modes of Enagement with News and their Relationship to Information Gain in Text

How do people engage with news articles post-click? How does the development of ideas within the text of articles affect post-click engagement? To address these questions I analyzed a large, client-side log data of over 7.7 million page views of 66,821 news articles from seven popular news publishers …

When Do People Expect More Likes and Comments on Facebook and From Whom?

Despite the fact that social media has been around for over a decade now, we still know reletively little about people's expectations for getting attention and responses from their online friends. In this work we examine the often overlooked end of the attention ``transaction'': the content producer's expectation to be …

Changes in Engagement Before and After Posting to Facebook

Our recent work got accepted to CHI 2016! See the publications page for the full paper.

I think this work is interesting for three main reasons: the questions we addressed, the methodology for answering them, and the answers we arrived at.

The fundamental question we addressed in this work is …

WSDM 2014 Summary, Opinions and Other Thoughts

It was a great attending WSDM this year, right at the heart of NYC! I could not possibly cover all that went down there in the three days of the conference, but would use this post to highlight sessions and talks that I attended and found particularly interesting.

The conference …

Our Semantic Keyword Expansion API is ON!

If you ever wanted to track a certain topic on Twitter, you probably wondered what keywords people are using to refer to it. Our new Semantic Expansion API lets you do exactly that - given a short list of keywords, it finds keywords that appear in a similar context or directly …

Best Practices for Querying Twitter API using (forked) tweepy

Over the past few weeks I have been accessing Twitter API from python using tweepy. In the course of doing so, I added support in tweepy for using multiple authentication handlers, monitoring rate limits, waiting when running out of calls, support for search using Twitter API v1.1, proper pagination …

Extracting Diurnal Patterns of Real World Activity from Social Media

Our most recent work got accepted to ICWSM 2013! See the publications page for the full paper.

Here is the abstract:
In this study, we develop methods to identify verbal expressions in social media streams that refer to real-world activities. Using aggregate daily patterns of Foursquare checkins, our methods extract …