Dr. James Caverlee, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was invited to give the first fall 2014 Distinguished Speaker Seminar hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. Caverlee's presentation was on "Geo-Social Footprints in Social Media: Opportunities and Challenges."
The talk highlighted his research team's work on mining, modeling, and analyzing large-scale geospatial footprints. "
Footprints are defined as the widespread adoption of GPS-enabled tagging of social media content via smartphones and social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare)," said Caverlee. "These 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 geosocial systems."
Caverlee's research focuses on web-scale information management, distributed data-intensive systems, and social computing. He has received three Google Faculty Research Awards since joining the computer science and engineering faculty at Texas A&M University. In 2012 he was awarded the NSF Faculty Early CAREER award and an Air Force Office of Scientific Research-Young Investigator Program grant.
Caverlee has a doctoral degree in computer science from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds master's degrees in computer science and in engineering-economic systems & operations research from Stanford. His bachelor's degree is in economics from Duke.