Compass

With the widespread growth of various social network tools and platforms, analyzing and understanding societal response and crowd reaction to important and emerging social issues and events through social media data is increasingly an important problem. However, there are numerous challenges towards realizing this goal effectively and efficiently, due to the unstructured and noisy nature of social media data. The large volume of the underlying data also presents a fundamental challenge. Furthermore, in many application scenarios, it is often interesting, and in some cases critical, to discover patterns and trends based on geographical and/or temporal partitions, and keep track of how they will change overtime.