Chairholders
Profile
Ebrahim Bagheri
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ryerson University
Chair title
NSERC/Warranty Life Industrial Research Chair in Social Media Analytics
Chair program
Industrial Research Chairs program
Role
Associate Chairholder since 2017
Summary
There is a tremendous amount of user-generated content on social platforms that can be used to extract actionable insight for many application areas. For instance, researchers have already found very practical applications for information “mined” from social content, such as predicting stock market prices, designing emergency responses for earthquake and tsunami incidents, predicting movie and music sales, predicting election outcomes, and detecting and preventing crime, just to name a few. The proposed research program is based on extracting actionable insight from user-generated social content for electronic commerce marketing design, customization and planning.
The objective of this IRC research program is not only to develop tools and techniques that extract interesting facts and statistics about products and users from social media and network platforms, but also to provide insight into how social feedback content from the users about products are related to electronic commerce design and delivery. We will be designing techniques to answer key questions, such as whether statistical correlation or causation between social feedback content and other product features and attributes can allow social feedback content to be predicted before a product’s release, in order to enhance planning and design. Another question is whether it is possible to identify latent user communities that have similar inclinations toward a specific brand or product and, if so, what shared and common attributes they possess that can be used for targeted customization. To achieve the research objectives, we will advance the state of the art in:
- mining and predicting user—and product—related information from social network platforms by applying language modelling and deep neural networks to learn product representations;
- identifying communities of interest from social networks through a combination of content sampling, summarization, link prediction and tensor factorization techniques;
- performing temporal analysis of social network content such as determining correlational or causational relations by modelling social content effectively.
The chair program will produce significant research outcomes that will be incrementally transferred to the industrial partner to assist with the efficient design and delivery of marketing plans. The IRC program will also help Canadian industry increase its competitiveness in the global marketplace through research, innovation, technology transfer and new product development.
Partner
- Warranty Life Inc.
Contact information
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ryerson University
Email: bagheri@ryerson.ca
