The SMU Office of Postgraduate Research Programmes organised its Second Interdisciplinary Seminar on ‘Big Data and Machine Learning’. The Seminar, held virtually on 21 May 2021, was open to all SMU postgraduate research students and faculty members. More than 50 postgraduate research students and faculty members attended the Seminar.
Our esteemed speakers included Professor Archan MISRA (SMU Vice Provost of Research) and Assistant Professor Richard CROWLEY. Associate Professor Hannah CHANG (Director, PhD Programmes at SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business) moderated the session.
Participants gained insights from the speakers about machine learning and its applications. Richard shared about the social media platform, Twitter, and how its different algorithms can classify the content, compare the underlying meaning of tweets and leverage social media to gauge a population’s emotional reaction to an event.
Archan discussed big data and machine learning via a variety of participatory ‘smart-city’ services from different case studies conducted in Singapore, including mobile crowdsourcing (based on the ‘sharing economy model’), mobility analytics (in terms of targeted mobile advertising via social media platform, Foursquare), and urban mobility analytics (based on bus disembarkation predictability).
Professor Hannah CHANG had a very engaging question and answer session with both speakers about some potential insightful, new data sources from a plethora of social media platforms like Reddit and Tiktok to wearable technology like smartwatches. She also discussed potential research questions that can be studied with greater precision as well as the available data toolkits for SMU students and faculty.
