Monitoring Geo-social Activities through Micro-blogging Sites

Micro-blogging sites are not only a place for sharing instant update sharing, but also an unexplored land where we can monitor and analyze our society from a great deal of everyone's buzz. Interestingly, recent smartphones are enabling us to easily write some micro-blogs outdoors and publish them with additional tags about automatically identified location and time. In the respect of the great number of participating users and their global distribution, we can regard such micro-blogging sites as an unprecedented sensor network in which each person is a kind of sensor to aware the real world events and reporting their observations and opinions voluntarily. In this paper, we first introduce our efforts to develop a geo-social activity monitoring system based on the micro-blogging sites by aggregating and analyzing such a novel dataset. We also present our preliminary work to find meaning geo-social activities with their influence regions through extracting characteristic moving patterns of mobile micro-bloggers.