Computer Science & Electrical Engineering

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Interesting research created by our CSEE students:
“TweetCollector: a Framework for Retrieving, Processing, and Storing Live Data from Twitter”
Ross A. Pokorny
Professor Timothy W. Finin
Professor Anupam K. Joshi

Social media systems like Twitter and Facebook provide an important new source of information about emerging events, interests, opinions, and trends. While these posts are brief, they are rich in meta data and connected to complex social networks. Twitter is an especially interesting source due to its openness and high volume of over 100 million posts a day. Collecting, filtering, analyzing and storing information from a dynamic Twitter stream is an essential component for any system that derives information from it. I designed and implemented TweetCollector as a scalable system to automatically collect Twitter status updates matching a user-specified query. The received tweets are run through an extensible workflow, to which new components can be added as needed. After processing, the status updates, along with the data generated during the processing phase, are stored in a relational database for human inspection and further analysis. Scalability is achieved in a multicore environment through the use of multi-threading and resource pooling. TweetCollector ensures reliable collection of statuses with on-the-fly processing in order to allow social media researchers to rapidly discover and react to new information from a promising new data source.

Meet a current research student:

• Aaleyah Lewis

Meet a research alumnae:

• Dr. Harry Chen
• Stephen Dibenedetto
• Phillip Hilliard
• Mark Horton
• Stephanie Milani
• Bradley Potteiger
• Nicholas Stewart

Benefits for CSEE students:

• Work with a faculty member
• Experience hands-on research
• Reinforce classroom learning
• Prepare for work or graduate school
• Travel to national conferences
• Receive grant funding
• Publish independent research
• Real Time Rendering of Elevation on a Spherical Model of the Earth.
  David Chapman. UMBC Review Vol.8.
• Modeling Sensory Input.
  Geoffrey Clapp. UMBC Review Vol.12.
• Symbolism of Light and Dark in European Oil Painting
  John Winder. UMBC Review Vol.13.

Considering graduate school in a computing field?

• The Computing Community Consortium

So, what are you doing next summer?

• Computing Community Consortium for Undergraduates
• NIST
• Laura Anzaldi
• Max Poole
• Brandon Alexander
• NASA Internships
• RISE Summer Internship Program
• Computing Community Consortium
• National Science Foundation
• Pathways to Science
• UMBC Summer Research Opportunities
• FERMILAB/SIST
• Advancing Science, Serving Society
• University of Washington – AccessSTEM
• Summer Research Opportunities Spreadsheet

Travel Grant:

• The Dr. Gerald A. Soffen Memorial Fund

Get started today!

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