Computer Sciences Commons^™

Whom Should We Sense In 'Social Sensing' - Analyzing Which Users Work Best For Social Media Now-Casting, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given the ever increasing amount of publicly available social media data, there is growing interest in using online data to study and quantify phenomena in the offline 'real' world. As social media data can be obtained in near real-time and at low cost, it is often used for 'now-casting' indices such as levels of flu activity or unemployment. The term 'social sensing' is often used in this context to describe the idea that users act as 'sensors', publicly reporting their health status or job losses. Sensor activity during a time period is then typically aggregated in a 'one tweet, one …