Who: Phil Renaud and Ali Daniyal of Affinio, Inc.

Where: KCIC Auditorium, Acadia University

When: November 14, 2014 from 2:30PM-4:00PM

Title: Mining and Visualizing Social Network Data

Abstract:

Social Network data analysis has become both an important research topic as well as a tool of modern business. We’ll discuss the characteristics of three major components of social data analysis: the acquisition, clustering and map/reducing, and visualization of data. Examples of benefits and drawbacks of various clustering algorithms and forms of visualization will be discussed, and we’ll present a workflow that shows off several of these techniques.

Bios:

Phil Renaud: Phil is a developer and speaker with interests ranging from data visualization to natural language processing and data journalism. His primary code workflow involves Javascript (D3.js, Ember, Underscore) Python (Pandas, NumPy, NLTK), and Gephi. In 2013 he co-founded Affinio, a Halifax-based Data Science startup.

Ali Daniyal: Ali Daniyal is an IT professional with a diverse experience, of over 10 years, ranging from the development of large scale commercial software to research in Computer Science. He has worked on several fronts in the IT industry with roles as developer, team lead, project manager and specification engineer. Currently he is a Software Developer at Affinio Inc. where he is engaged in developing big-data mining solutions. He is also a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science, Dalhousie University. His research interests are in the areas of Automated Planning, Machine Learning and Semantic Web. He has also worked in the domains of Healthcare Systems, Oceanography, Marine Biology, Tactical Training and Distributed Simulations.