Note: we need a venue for this talk fitting at least 50 people & providing them with pizza & beer!:)

This talk is about the construction of new data assets from social media using techniques drawn from the areas of information retrieval, machine learning, graphs, & social networks. Ill describe three projects based on Twitter & Foursquare data sets that use social data in different ways to help users in information seeking scenarios. The first one, a recommender system for recreational queries using location-based social networks. The second project, a social knowledge graph derived from Twitter with the goal of discovering relationships between people, links, & topics. And the third one, an application for archiving & Wikification of stories.

Omar Alonso is a Principal Applied Scientist with Microsoft where he works on the intersection of information retrieval, social data, human computation, & knowledge graph generation. He is the co-chair of the Human Computation & Crowdsourcing track at WWW'19 & on the organizing committee for HCOMP'19.