December 8 – 10, 2014, World Bank, Washington DC: INTERNATIONAL CORRUPTION HUNTERS ALLIANCE (ICHA) – Network analysis for detecting fraud

26OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

THIRD BIENNIAL MEETING OF THE WORLD BANK GROUP’S

INTERNATIONAL CORRUPTION HUNTERS ALLIANCE (ICHA)

December 8 – 10, 2014, World Bank, Washington DC

I will speak about the value of a network perspective for the discovery of fraud and corruption in financial data at the December 9th session of the World Bank’s upcoming meeting of the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative.

“The World Bank Group’s International Corruption Hunters Alliance (ICHA) brings together heads and senior officials of corruption investigating bodies and prosecuting authorities, anti-corruption experts, academics, and representatives of international organizations from over 130 countries. The 2014 meeting of the Alliance will focus on fighting corruption – and the vast illicit outflows generated by corruption – by sharing know-how and experiences in the use of both traditional and alternative corruption fighting approaches.”

All financial transactions create a network as one person transfers money from one account to another. A list of transactions creates a web of connections with an emergent shape or pattern. Within these patterns are key positions occupied by people with special power in the network. Mapping these transaction networks can reveal the hidden traces of financial crime.

November 17-18, 2014: Cape Town South Africa: MammothBI Conference – talk about social media networks

25OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I am delighted to return to South Africa where I will participate in the Mammoth BI conference in Cape Town, on November 17-18, 2014 at the Cape Town International Conference Centre, Convention Square, 1 Lower Long Street, Cape Town, 8001, Western Cape, South Africa.

November 6 and 7, 2014: University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) symposium on The Future of Big Data in Lincoln, Nebraska

25OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) at a symposium on The Future of Big Data in Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 6 and 7, 2014.

The event will feature presentations from academia, government, and the private sector, and workshops/lectures on topics related to big data. This event is open to the public.

Students and postdoctoral researchers are welcome to attend. The event should bring together people working in the computational sciences, federal agencies, and industry experts specializing in data management, analytics, and the future of information.

Agenda: Thursday, November 6

8:30 a.m. Welcome

8:45 a.m. Tim Hesterberg, Google
9:30 a.m. Valinda Scarbro Kennedy, IBM Academic Initiative, Relationship Manager
10:15 a.m. Break
10:45 a.m. Jeffrey Gerard, The Climate Corporation
11:30 a.m. Jerry Roell, John Deere
12:15 p.m. Lunch; Tsengdar Lee, Project Manager, NASA
1:30 p.m. Two Concurrent Sessions:

Ag & Natural Resources

1:30 p.m. Adina Howe, Argonne National Lab Soil Microbiome
2:15 p.m. Natalia De Leon, Wisconsin
3:00 p.m. Heuermann Reception Lecture on Future of Agriculture
3:30 p.m. Heuermann Lecture on Future of Agriculture

Physics/Engineering/Social Sciences/Libraries

1:30 p.m. Carl Lundstedt, UNL/CERN
2:15 p.m. Heidi Imker, Ullinois (Libraries)
3:00 p.m. Break
3:30 p.m. Marc Smith, Social Media Research Foundation

5:00–7:00 p.m. Poster Session and Reception

Friday, November 7

8:30 a.m. Adam Glynn, Emory University, and Konstantin Kashin, Harvard; Big Data and Social Sciences
9:15 a.m. Jennifer Thoegersen, UNL Data Curation Librarian
10:00 a.m. Panel with representatives from federal agencies to discuss funding opportunities:

Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D., Associate Director for Data Science, NIH
Ian Foster, Ph.D., Director of the Computation Institute & Argonne Distinguished Fellow, Argonne National Lab
George Strawn (Director, Networking and Information Technology Research & Development; NITRD)

12:00 p.m. Lunch and Keynote Speaker (Animal Sciences)

1:00 p.m. Todd Mockler, Danforth Center
1:45 p.m. Henry Neeman, HPC, University of Oklahoma
2:30 p.m. Adjourn

November 3 – 5, 2014 – Restaurant Executive Summit – Mapping restaurant networks in social media

25OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The 2014 Restaurant Executive Summit will be held on November 3 – 5, 2014 at the Ritz-Carlton in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

The theme of the event is “How to Feed Consumers with a #Digital @ppetite”

I will speak about the ways that restaurants and dining experiences are discussed in social media. I will show network maps that visualize the relationships among people who talk about restaurants created with the free and open NodeXL social media network analysis and visualization application.

Here are some recent NodeXL social media network maps for mentions of major chain restaurants featured in the NodeXL Graph Gallery:

DunkinDonuts

McDonalds

Chipotle

@olivegarden

These maps illustrate the shape of the crowd that gathers around the names of major chain restaurants. A few Twitter user accounts occupy key positions in these network crowds, these are the influential voices that are repeated widely by others.

Closer inspection (click through for details) reveals smaller groups or clusters which form as a smaller set of people interact with one another more than with the larger population. These groups have distinct topics of interest which are summarized in the content report associated with each visualization.

The network and content report can reveal the topics of interest to various groups in the discussion as well as the key people within each group.

Three phases of social media network success for marketing

19OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The social media landscape is complex. Social media network analysis makes it easier to understand and navigate social media.

Using the NodeXL social media network analysis add-in for Excel from the Social Media Research Foundation, I have made a large collection of network visualizations and reports, many of which can be seen in the NodeXL Graph Gallery.

Now that I have seen many social media network maps I observe that marketers are often interested in building “broadcast” network patterns. This is one of the six basic social media network patterns documented in the recent Pew Research Internet Project report about Mapping Twitter Topic Networks.

There are at least three phases of possible success for a social media marketing effort: phase 1, you get an audience of people who will retweet what you post. Phase 2, some of your audience gets its own audience for the content they repost from you. Phase 3, a dense web of relationships emerges, a community of relationships. This is a desirable phase because it sustains the conversation event when new messages from the brand account are not created.

October 2-3, 2014: Digital Strategies for Development Summit, Asian Institute of Management, Makati City, Philippines – Mapping social media networks

22SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I attended and participated in the October 2-3, 2014 Digital Strategies for Development Summit hosted by the Asian Institute of Management and held in Makati City, Philippines.

The event gathered 50 speakers from around the world and more than 300 participants to focus on the role of digital and social technologies for civic needs. The summit focused on bringing people from many communities into a discussion of how technology can be used for:

“…enabling a better society and an empowered community? How can various stakeholders, including Government, Private Sector and Civil Society gain more momentum for their core mandates by leveraging the use of digital technology enabled solutions? Can Digital Technology create a platform for better collaboration and cooperation amongst various stakeholders?”

I spoke about the role social network analysis can play in understanding the emerging world of social media and computer mediated collective action.

29-30 September at the University of Melbourne – Talk about social media networks

07SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Best Practice in Data Journalism Workshop

PROGRAM
29-30 September 2014

Terrace Lounge, Level 1, Walter Boas Building, Parkville Campus

(Campus map at http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville)

MONDAY 29 SEPTEMBER

9-9.30AM	REGISTRATION AND WELCOME
9.30-9.45am	WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS- DR MARGARET SIMONS AND CARLTON CONNECT
9.45am-11	Presentations and Q and A from journalists: Marc Moncrieff and Craig Butt – Fairfax Media; Lisa Cornish – Red Cross (formerly News Corp); Harrison Polites – Business Spectator.
11-11.30	MORNING TEA
11.30-12.30	Presentations by Journalists (continued): Ed Tadros – Australian Financial Review; Matt Liddy, ABC; Nick Evershed – The Guardian in Australia.
12.30-1PM	ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION AND IDENTIFICATION OF COMMON THEMES AND CHALLENGES
1PM-2PM	LUNCH
2PM-2.30pm	AURIN – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Professor Richard Sinnott, University of Melbourne.
2.30-3pm	NodeXL – Exploring the potential – Presentation by Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation
3-3.30pm	AFTERNOON TEA
3.30PM-5PM	Panel Session – Big Data. What Next? With Craig Thomler (Delib), Professor Paul Jensen (Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne); Jodie McVernon, (School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne), Scott Ewing, (World Internet Project, Swinburne Institute for Social Research.)

There will be a 3 hour session introducing NodeXL on Tuesday from 2-5pm 30th September at the main Parkville campus of UniMelb. The event is open to the public and is free.

It will be in the Old Arts Building Lecture Theatre B.

The main session will run from 2-4pm and there will be an additional hour for those that want to stop on for further training, finishing at 5pm

If you want to use NodeXL in the session, you will need a Windows laptop, and the Windows version of Excel (2007/2010/2013).

You can download NodeXL in advance from: http://nodexl.codeplex.com/.

Map and Building:

http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/149#.VCTinmS1Zlo

Download instructions:

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/releases/view/117659

September 26, 2014: Sydney #Disrupt – Talking about social media networks

07SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I will be speaking at the University of Sydney on September 26th, 2014 as part of the 2014 Sydney Disrupt conference.

This year’s theme is “Living Disruption”.

Speakers include:

A keynote by Maria Ogneva, on community building for employee and customer engagement
A keynote by Tom Hajdu, CEO of Disrupter, on disruptive innovations in the entertainment industry
Mya Dellow presenting her perspective on the educational value of the online gaming platform Minecraft.
Academy Award winner Mark Sagar demonstrating BabyX, a photo-realistic, intelligent infant avatar.
A panel of experts discussing the potentials and risk of gamification.
Marc Smith from the Social Media Research Foundation will provide practical knowledge about analyzing social media data in straight forward ways with freely available tools.
Ripple Effect Group team leading a wearable technologies design workshop.

Here is a recent map of the connections among people who tweeted “#disrupt“:

Here is a video review of the 2013 #Disrupt event.

I will also lead a workshop on using NodeXL, in a hands-on training on 25th September 2014 from 9am to 12pm in the Link Building (J13), Room 417.

The workshop is sponsored by the Digital Disruption Research Group (DDRG), in collaboration with the Complex Systems Research Group at the Faculty of Engineering & IT.

Talk September 12th: Retail & Consumer Goods Analytics Summit, San Diego – The Impact of Social Media on Data & Analytics

30JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

RIS News, the leading media organization for retail executives, and Consumer Goods Technology, the leading source for the consumer goods sector, have partnered to launch the 2014 Retail and Consumer Goods Analytics Summit. The conference hashtag is #RCAS2014.

I will speak on September 12th at the event. I present the Closing Keynote from 2:30 – 3:10pm on Friday. My talk is titled:

The Impact of Social Media on Data & Analytics

Speaker: Marc Smith, Director, Social Media Research Foundation

People talk about the products and services the use, love or hate all the time in social media. These conversations can be better understood through perspective of social network analysis. Network theory views the world as a web of connected people. Network analysis builds measures and visualizations of collections of connections to reveal the key people, groups and issues in these conversations. Using social media network maps and reports the confusing landscape of tweets and posts comes into focus. Information visualizations of the virtual crowds of people gathered around every brand, product, event, or service highlights the range of variation in the shape of these crowds. Six different patterns have been identified so far, allowing social media managers to recognize the nature of the brand network they have and the nature of the network they want to have. Network measures are useful as KPIs for tracking not just the size and volume of a social media stream, but also the shape and structure of the pattern of connections. The six patterns: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and in and out hub and spoke, are a useful guide to strategic engagement in social media.

These are social media network maps and reports for the terms risnewsinsights and “consumergoods OR cgsm2014 OR cgtmagazine“:

risnewsinsights Twitter…

consumergoods OR cgsm20

NodeXL is hiring: C#, .NET, ASP.NET, VSTO, Admin for servers and MySQL

23JulMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The NodeXL team seeks qualified full and part time software developers to contribute to the development of the NodeXL application and the NodeXL Graph Gallery web site.

NodeXL is sponsored by the Social Media Research Foundation and is a free and open way to get insights into connected structures like networks. NodeXL makes it easy to extract networks from many social media platforms, and automatically process the data into a network visualization and report. Using NodeXL researchers, scholars, analysts, marketing, PR and event professionals can all easily collect, store, analyze, visualize, and publish reports on social media networks.

We seek a skilled developer who can work in a distributed virtual team to maintain end extend the application.

Candidates should have the following skills:

Required: .NET development skills in C#.

Because most of the NodeXL software is written in C#.

Required: Basic system administrator skills. Amazon EC2 experience is a plus, but certainly not required.

We have three NodeXL EC2 servers that need to be kept up and running. This involves regular server monitoring, backups, Windows updates, increasing disk sizes when necessary, and so on.

Desired: Excel programming skills, preferably with Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).

The NodeXL Excel Template uses VSTO. These skills might be hard to come by, though, and any C# programmer should be able to learn the Excel programming model without much difficulty.

Desired: MySQL programming and administrator skills.

The NodeXL Graph Server runs on MySQL. Bonus: Experience dealing with larger databases. The Graph Server database is approaching half a terabyte, and having someone who knows how to manage that would be a big plus.

Desired: ASP.NET / HTML / CSS / JavaScript skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery is implemented in ASP.Net.

Desired: SQL Server programming skills.

The NodeXL Graph Gallery back end runs on SQL Server.

Would be nice: Forum moderation experience.

Because people ask lots of questions on the NodeXL CodePlex Discussion board.

Interested? Email marc@connectedaction.net to submit an application.