iSchool faculty and students will participate in the University of Illinois Social Media Analytics Summit, which will be held on Tuesday, May 2, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The event will take place at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) auditorium. Registration is free, but space is limited.

The event is jointly organized by Joe Yun, adjunct professor of social media analytics and doctoral candidate at Illinois, and iSchool faculty members Jana Diesner, assistant professor and doctoral program director, and Robert Brunner, professor.

The focus of the summit is to bring together researchers, educators, students, and outside industry partners who are interested in the realm of social media analytics research. This emerging field uses sophisticated tools to gather data from stakeholder conversations to allow informed and insightful decision making.

The morning will consist mainly of lightning talks about work conducted on the Urbana campus, within academia, and within the social media analytics industry. It also will include a networking refreshment break to encourage cross-pollination of ideas among attendees.

Diesner and Brunner will make introductory remarks and doctoral students Shubhanshu Mishra, Rezvaneh "Shadi" Rezapour, and Aseel Addawood (Informatics) will present lightning talks as follows:

• "Welcome to the Social Media Analytics Summit: Challenges and Opportunities in an Emerging Field" (Diesner)
• "iDSI: The Illinois Data Science Initiative" (Brunner)
• "Automatic Information Extraction from Unstructured Text" (Mishra)
• "Classification and Analysis of Sources Referenced in Tweets on Controversial and Non­Controversial Topics" (Rezapour and Addawood)

The event is co-sponsored by the Illinois Data Science Initiative (iDSI) and Research IT at Technology Services. Brunner is co-chair of the steering committee for iDSI; Diesner and iSchool Professors Bertram Ludäscher and Ted Underwood serve as committee members.