• 讲座信息

09.28|Mining Online Crowds for Fun and Profit

2015.09.18

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报告人: Prof. Ben Y. Zhao (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)时间:2015 年 9 月 28 日(周一)上午 9:50-11:10地点:计算机楼 405联系人:陈阳 chenyang@fudan.edu.cn
Abstract: 
Crowdsourcing provides a fast and easy way for those with challenging problems to get help from real human "workers" across the Internet.  The rapid growth of crowdsourced systems provides opportunities and challenges in a variety of areas ranging from security, data mining to human computer interaction. In this talk, I'll present some of our recent results across multiple projects at the UCSB SAND Lab focused on crowdsourced systems.  I’ll briefly introduce our work in a) using crowdsourcing to protect online social networks, b) defending against malicious crowds, c) challenges in securing crowdsourced content, and d) mining noisy crowdsourced content for value. Much of my talk will be focused on our recent work in mining for financial data in crowdsourced content. I will present results of our CSCW paper on crowdsourced investments, where we analyze 8+ years of historical data on crowdsourced investment analysis sites.  We show that in extremely challenging fields like stock market analysis, wisdom of the crowd does not help directly to produce good results, but can be extremely valuable in distinguishing real experts from the rest of the crowd.  Our work shows that by applying a very simple investment strategy based on mining crowdsourced investment sites, we can consistently and significantly beat US stock market averages in each of the past 8+ years. Finally, I’ll discuss work in current and ongoing projects at the SAND Lab.
Short bio: 
Ben Zhao is a Professor at the Computer Science department, U. C. Santa Barbara.  He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley (2000, 2004), and his B.S. from Yale (1997). He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, MIT Technology Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), ComputerWorld Magazine's Top 40 Technology Innovators award, Google Faculty awards, and IEEE ITC Early Career Award. His work has been covered by media outlets such as New York Times, Boston Globe, MIT Tech Review, and Slashdot.  He has published over 120 publications in areas of security and privacy, networked and distributed systems, wireless networks, data-intensive computing and HCI, with more than 20,000 citations (H-index 51). Finally, he has chaired a number of conferences (WOSN, WWW OSN track, IPTPS, IEEE P2P), and the upcoming World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016). He is a co-founder and on the steering committee of the ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN).备注:在报告当天中午 12:30-13:15,在计算机楼 405,Ben Y. Zhao 教授将会作一个关于 UCSB 计算机系以及他所领导的 SAND Lab 团队的招生专场介绍,非常欢迎感兴趣的同学参加。

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