ICWSM 2008

I've just returned and rested from my trip to ICWSM 2008. I've been very excited about this conference for a bit, posting about work modeling blog links and etc.

I was not disappointed. I almost skipped the tutorials, which would have been a big mistake, thankfully Akshay beat some sense into me. The first tutorial on subjectivity and sentiment analysis by Dr. Jan Wiebe was well worth my entire trip out there. The second tutorial by Mary McGlohon on graph mining techniques was also great.

Then there were the invited talks, of which David Sifry was my favorite. A very good short synopsis of this talk can be found at Akshay's new blog.

We also had some great demos like Microsoft's Blews, which uses both the strength of the opinion and the self reported party affiliation of blogs talking about news articles to help readers find political news articles they want to read. I know MSR was using data provided by Matt Hurst's team (in Live Labs) for something in this product. I wonder if they're using any of the code I wrote last summer to capture twitter posts for this?

Look at all this cool stuff, and I haven't even talked about a single full length conference paper yet!