The advent of Web 2.0 technologies and applications has enabled average people—who were previously mere consumers of online content—to publish their own content on various websites, such as blogs, consumer-evaluation platforms (such as Amazon, eBay, and TripAdvisor), news websites (through reader comments), social networking services (such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), media-sharing webs...

Technology, especially multimedia technology, is changing the way we tell stories. We are all familiar with letters, articles, and books, but new Internet technology has led to two novel forms of storytelling that we call micro stories and mega stories. Micro stories are the short bits of text and images that we use to tell our friends about our daily life, what we had for lunch, and the funny ...

We live in world today where the average citizen can zoom into the planet from Google Earth, walk down a virtual street in Google Street View, access live imagery and video on breaking events from remote regions via YouTube and Instagram, and search 100 petabyte indexes that learn and evolve to tailor themselves to hundreds of millions of individual users and even adjust the material returned b...

Most of the internet today is composed of digital media that includes videos and images. With pixels becoming the currency in which most transactions happen on the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to have a way of browsing through this ocean of information with relative ease. YouTube has 400 hours of video uploaded every minute and many million images are browsed on Instagram, Fa...

Sentiment Analysis (SA) or Opinion Mining is the process of analysing natural language texts to detect an emotion or a pattern of emotions towards a certain product to make a decision about that product. SA is a topic of text mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and web mining disciplines. Research in SA is currently at its peak given the amount of data generated from social media networks...

Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) like Twitter or Instagram are a good source for user spatio-temporal behavior. These networks collect data from users in such a way that they can be seen as a set of collective and distributed sensors of a geographical area. A low rate sampling of user’s location information can be obtained during large intervals of time that can be used to discover complex...

1 Background: Instagram (a popular image-based social media app) with millions of posts each day can be used to inform public health interventions and policies but current research relying on image-based data often relies on hand coding of images which is time consuming, costly, and may be subject to researcher bias. What is more, current best practices in automated image classification (e.g., ...

BACKGROUND "Fitspiration" (also known as "fitspo") aims to inspire individuals to exercise and be healthy, but emerging research indicates exposure can negatively impact female body image. Fitspiration is frequently accessed on social media; however, it is currently unclear the degree to which messages about body image and exercise differ by gender of the subject. OBJECTIVE The aim of our stu...