Nov. 13: How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World

Mark your calendars! As part of our November speaker series SILSSA Presents:
How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World: Location, Photos, Mobile and the Social Media Cycle.
Mor Naaman of Yahoo! Research Berkley is coming to speak at SILS Tuesday, November 13th at 6pm in room 213.

Abstract:
Public collections of shared photographs can expose large-scale photo-taking patterns, providing far richer information than can be derived from individual images or photo sets. I will first describe how we extract meaningful information from public collections of “geotagged” images on Flickr. This type of information allows us, for example, to produce summaries and visualizations of the photo collections, making the collections more accessible and easier to browse and understand as they scale. I will then describe how the same type of information can also be used to improve any user’s photo experience, using new applications such as ZoneTag and Zurfer. ZoneTag is a mobile client that enables capture, upload and “tag suggestions” for cameraphone photographs. ZoneTag thus forms the basis for a rich personal and social media retrieval/organization and sharing system. I will wrap up the talk by describing user studies that investigated user motivations in photo collections.

BIO:
Mor Naaman is a research scientist at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. His research focuses on context and location-based tools and algorithms for interacting with media. Mor has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photos throughout his working life. In previous careers, Mor was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ.

We read your surveys and saw you wanted speakers talking about technology and social media. So we delivered.
Hope to see you there!
SILSSA