social media

Tech Connections Attract New Social Media Tenant

admin — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 15:36:41 +0000

Tech Connections Attract New Social Media Tenant admin Tue, 08/20/2024 - 11:36

Fanbase, a next-generation social media app, has become the latest up-and-coming business to move into Encore, Georgia Tech’s business growth-and-scaling hub in West Midtown. Located within The Interlock mixed-use complex on Howell Mill Road, Encore is positioned to connect companies to the resources and talent of Georgia Tech and other schools and businesses in the rapidly growing technology epicenter Atlanta has become.

A New Boost for Tech Startups

Fanbase, founded by songwriter, music producer, and entrepreneur Isacc Hayes III, is dedicated to nurturing an ecosystem of innovation through partnerships with emerging startups. At Encore, startups can collaborate closely with Fanbase and Georgia Tech, leveraging their expertise and networks. This collaboration aims to accelerate tech startup growth by providing resources and opportunities to experiment, develop, and launch new products and services alongside Fanbase. A key development of the Fanbase/Encore collaboration is an innovative podcast studio available for use by tech startups and select partners.

Encore provides cutting-edge meeting facilities including extensive areas for creative projects, state-of-the-art equipment for onboarding new Fanbase users, and conference spaces for launching new initiatives. Positioned near the Georgia Tech campus and the historically Black colleges and universities that comprise the Atlanta University Center, Encore facilitates collaboration with academic researchers and access to student talent, essential for ongoing innovation.

Details About the Fanbase App

Fanbase currently offers six functionalities:

Flickz (short-form video)

Fanbase Audio (social audio chat)

Fanbase+ (long-form video)

Fanbase Stories

Live streaming on Fanbase Live

Main feed photo and video upload

Encore is managed by Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures, a Georgia Tech affiliate.

Learn more here: encoregt.org.

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech's growth-and-scaling hub, Encore, has attracted a new tenant called Fanbase which is an up-and-coming social media app

Summary

Dateline

Tue, 08/20/2024 - 12:00

Blair.Meeks@gatech.edu

Keywords

social media

News room topics

Business and Economic Development

Social Media Study Identifies Mental Health Culture at Top-Ranked Campuses

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:12:32 +0000

Social Media Study Identifies Mental Health Culture at Top-Ranked Campuses admin Tue, 02/07/2023 - 13:12

Using information gleaned from social media, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mental health index for the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities. Their study looked at five years of data on Reddit, scanning it for comments about issues that included depression, financial and academic anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Schools were given a score based on the frequency of those threads and robustness of the conversations.

The research found that students at higher-ranked schools have better mental health than those at lower-ranked colleges. The well-being index is also better at universities with higher tuition. It’s lower at large public schools with a majority of female students.

The study doesn’t identify schools individually for privacy reasons.

“Online conversations about mental health issues are definitely increasing,” said Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Tech’s assistant professor, from the School of Interactive Computing, who led the study. “We saw it rise 16 percent from 2011 to 2015, even after we took into account that Reddit has become more popular in recent years.”

The study focused on the top 150 universities as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, gathering data from the 109 of them with active Reddit accounts.

De Choudhury suggests that the reason there are less posts about tuition anxiety at more expensive colleges is because their students tend to be more affluent than the average public school attendee. Therefore, the stresses of paying for college or going into debt aren’t as great. De Choudhury also thinks that the wider variety of backgrounds at large public schools likely lends itself to a more robust sharing of stress and anxiety issues.

“As for more posts about mental health at universities with more females, I don’t think it’s necessarily because women have more anxiety,” De Choudhury said. “Research has traditionally shown that females are more likely to express their emotions and feelings whether in an offline setting or social media. It’s not that they have poorer mental health — it’s that they’re more likely to talk about their troubles while online.”

The study also found an overall increase in mental health posts as the academic year progressed. It peaked in the fall in November and was even higher in May. It gradually decreased each summer.

The Georgia Tech team used a method called transfer learning to mine the data. First, they created a model to scan subreddit threads about depression, bipolar disorder and other issues to learn patterns of what is written when people discuss mental health. Then the model was used on the higher education subreddit communities.

The algorithm scanned the five years of discussions, day by day, looking for clues. Once it found keywords and phrases, it measured the breadth of the conversations. The more frequent the posts and depths of the discussions, the lower the respective mental health indexes.

Overall, three percent of the threads on the 109 sites were about mental health topics.

De Choudhury has previously done similar social media research to help identify expressions of eating disorders, postpartum depression and suicide.

“I’ve always wondered if there are things about college students and mental health that we could learn by using these same social media research tactics,” De Choudhury said. “We wanted to see if we could do something more collectively at the campus level before digging deeper to understand the challenges individuals might be facing. Perhaps this data can be used to help campus administrators as they create policies in real-time to benefit student bodies dealing with stress and anxieties.”

The paper, “A Social Media-Based Index of Mental Well-Being in College Campuses,” was presented this month at the 2017 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver.

The study is partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant number 1R01GM11269701). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

Subtitle

Students at private, expensive universities exhibit better mental health than public school peers

Summary sentence

Using social media, researchers create a mental health index for country's top-ranked colleges.

Summary

Dateline

Thu, 06/01/2017 - 12:00

Contact

Jason Maderer
National Media Relations
maderer@gatech.edu
404-660-2926

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

social media

Munmun De Choudhury

depression

anxiety

News room topics

Health and Medicine

Science and Technology

Society and Culture

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

592303

Source updated

Thu, 06/01/2017 - 09:21

Georgia Tech Plans Tokyo Redesign Using Social Data – Including Tweets

bwaye3 — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 16:42:57 +0000

Georgia Tech Plans Tokyo Redesign Using Social Data – Including Tweets bwaye3 Tue, 04/19/2022 - 12:42

What if everyone in a neighborhood had a voice in redesigning it? How can city planners democratize future smart cities, big data analytics and decision-making by involving citizen participation?

That’s the vision of the Tokyo Smart City Studio, using GPS and other location data to track trends in human behavior. The studio is part of the Eco Urban Lab, directed by Perry Yang. In the Studio, Georgia Tech designers are changing the way we plan cities.

According to Yang, designers need to know, “how urban form accommodates flows of all kinds, including information, energy, and human movements, and how patterns of flows are mapped through physical configurations that change over time.” Using advanced analytics on a massive pool of data, designers can see how people choose to use a space. Then, they can make decisions based on real behavior rather than theoretical models or small surveys, Yang said.

Projects from the Studio recently drew Esri’s attention for their advanced use of geographic analytics. As part of the studio, students used large-scale location data to model traffic flows in different segments of Tokyo.

Esri is best known as the company that developed GIS (geographic information system) software which is widely used by city and regional planners. Esri's blog covers innovative use of geospatial data.

To date, the Studio has delivered smart-city proposals for three different Tokyo neighborhoods: Urawa-Misono in 2017, Kyojima in 2018-2019, and Shinagawa in 2020. Yang said this year’s project will involve the Nihonbashi district, home of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and a historic origin of Tokyo’s modern urban culture.

Tokyo is one of the busiest, most populous cities in the world, and as such, it’s difficult to create sustainable, healthy environments, said Yang. His studio focuses on global collaboration to solve the problems facing cities like Tokyo.

For the Nihonbashi district, the Studio is collaborating with the Department of Urban Engineering at the University of Tokyo; the Global Carbon Project; the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan; and the Mitsui Fudosan University of Tokyo Laboratory.

Thanks to the diversity of ideas that this collaboration generates, the Tokyo Smart City Studio proposals aren’t purely theoretical. Students work on real neighborhood needs identified by the local government, using real on-site data gathered and processed by groundbreaking methods. Massive amounts of data require AI techniques and algorithms to process some of them.

Design Makes Cities Smart

Unlike a smartphone or a smart home, a smart city is measured by more than its Internet connection or its automation. A city is smart because its design is based on data about flows of people, resources, energy, and information. “Empowered by new tools and technologies, cities are now far more designable than ever before. Future urban design and development are to be data-driven," Yang said.

"Cities are becoming more interactive and situation-driven and have to be more responsive, adaptable, and resilient to future conditions.”

Only in the past few years have smartphones, GPS, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices made real data on a city-wide scale available. These new technologies may enable good planning that is driven by social, institutional, and physical contexts, Yang said.

Students Predict Mobility Using AI Techniques

But new data and a new design philosophy require new methods of design, which haven’t been created yet. To meet this challenge, Yang’s students use AI techniques to create models of behavior.

An early test in Urawa-Misono used Tokyo traffic data. The model was “trained” using existing traffic data. Designers then check the model to see if correctly predicts congestion points. If it works, that suggests the model can be used to estimate the impact of design changes on traffic flow.

Methods like this allow designers to move mobility analytics into the design phase. Mobility is key in the urban environment, but mobility studies usually aren’t done until we envision how future urban spaces are shaped through design.

“Mobility research during these studios developed test processes to better integrate mobility metrics with design decisions,” Yang said.

The following studio in Kyojima expanded the role of deep learning techniques. Georgia Tech students participated in street experiments in Tokyo by carrying vital sensors to measure data such as heart beat, temperature, humidity, UV, pressure and acceleration of human movement, to understand human perception and their connections to urban street environments. Students created a rapid automatic assessment of sequential urban experiences: basically, how pleasant a person would experience walking down a street.

The resulting article, Computing Sequential Experience of an Urban Street using Deep Learning Technique, led by Helen Chen, a Ph.D. student in the School of City and Regional Planning, was presented at the 2019 International Conference of Urban Informatics.

Both the Urawa-Misono and Kyojima studio projects made mobility analysis and feedback part of the design phase, yielding designs better supporting resilience, sustainability, and community health.

Using Social Media to Check Risk of Heat Stress

In Tokyo, studio planners expanded mobility studies to include public health. Tokyo officials were concerned that heat waves would pose a risk to the 2020 Olympic crowds.

To address this, researchers used a combination of GPS and social networking service information to track people’s motion and response to heat “in near real-time [and] in high spatial resolution,” said Yang.

Students used thermal images from a helicopter to find hot zones. GPS data showed pedestrian exposure to those hot zones. The combination of heat and pedestrian exposure allowed prediction of risky areas.

In collaboration with partners in Japan, researchers searched geotagged twitter data for terms related to heat discomfort. They found a high correlation between the predicted risk zones and areas where people complained about heat.

Both the prediction of heat risk and the use of social media to check the prediction are new methods developed in the Studio.

Summary sentence

Students use big data and machine learning for neighborhood proposals.

Summary

Students in the Tokyo Smart City studio, of the Eco Urban Lab, are changing the way we plan cities. Using machine learning techniques on data from smartphones, GPS, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, students develop proposals based on measured human experience.

Dateline

Tue, 04/05/2022 - 12:00

ann.hoevel@design.gatech.edu

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

tokyo

Tokyo Smart City studio

Perry Pei-Ju Yang

eco urban lab

machine learning

gis

social media

big data analytics

Internet of Things

go-researchnews

News room topics

Society and Culture

Core research areas

Data Engineering and Science

People and Technology

Public Service, Leadership, and Policy

Mercury ID

657025

Source updated

Thu, 04/07/2022 - 15:05

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Tech Connections Attract New Social Media Tenant

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Social Media Study Identifies Mental Health Culture at Top-Ranked Campuses

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Georgia Tech Plans Tokyo Redesign Using Social Data – Including Tweets

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Students Predict Mobility Using AI Techniques

Using Social Media to Check Risk of Heat Stress

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