Sheffield Hallam University

We now live  a sea  tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction  the people  the connected world.  Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much  texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions.    can be a bewildering stream  comments, a daunting fire hose  content.  With better tools and a few key concepts from the  sciences, the   swarm  favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, updates and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities.  As more  interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations  human relationships and organizations become possible.  But new forms  data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.  

Speakers:

Wasim Ahmed is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Sheffield. He has delivered over 35 social media talks to agencies such as the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), the UK government, and universities across the world including a number of keynote talks such as to Boston University College of Communication. Wasim has experience on many social media projects with organisations such as Manchester United. He is also a member of the Social Media Research Foundation and regularly authors high-impact articles for the LSE Impact blog and mainstream media. He earned an MSc in Information System and a BA in Philosophy.

 Dr. Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation, a non-profit devoted to open tools and data related to social media research. Dr. Smith received a B.S. from Drexel, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He is a Distinguished Visiting