Associate Professor James Caverlee was a keynote speaker at the 37th International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2014) held in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, from July 6 - 11. Caverlee along with Microsoft Distinguished Scientist Susan Dumais and Miles Efron, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, addressed the challenge of spatial and temporal information access on July 11 during the "SIGIR 2014 Workshop on Temporal, Social and Spatially-aware Information Access."
With the widespread adoption of GPS-enabled tagging of social media content via smartphones and social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare), Caverlee's talk emphasized the new opportunities for mining, modeling, and leveraging the publicly-revealed spatio-temporal activities of millions of people. These "geo-social footprints" open new possibilities for understanding how ideas flow across the globe, how people can organize for societal impact, and lay the foundation for new crowd-powered geo-social systems.
In his talk, Caverlee highlighted his recent work on leveraging these large-scale geospatial footprints and suggested new future research opportunities for how geo-social findings can inform the design of better systems and algorithms for real-world impact.
Caverlee's research is generally in the areas of web-scale information management, distributed data-intensive systems, and social computing. Most recently, his work has focused on both geo-social systems that leverage large-scale spatio-temporal footprints in social media as well as emerging threats to social media and web systems. Recent projects in his lab have aimed at detecting, analyzing, modeling, and predicting strategic manipulation and adversarial propaganda in social media.
In 2007 Caverlee joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University after receiving his doctoral degree in computer science from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds master degrees in computer science and in engineering-economic systems & operations research from Stanford and a bachelor's degree in economics from Duke.
Among Caverlee's many honors are the 2014 Caterpillar Teaching Excellence Award, the NSF Faculty Early CAREER award in 2012, the 2012 Air Force Office of Scientific Research-Young Investigator Program grant, the 2011 Center for Teaching Excellence Montague-CTE Scholar award, and the 2010 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award.