Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thank you all for a wonderful semester.  Here is a summary, in chronological order, of our recorded lectures.  You can also view the entire playlist on youtube. Course Introduction Marti Hearst, the course instructor at UC Berkeley, introduces the main … Continue reading →

All are welcome!  210 South Hall.  Talks from 4-5; demos from 5-6.

For assignment 3, students analyzed and compared a portion of the Twitter “conversation graph” and the “interest graph”.  Conversations were found by looking for Twitter “@mentions” and interest graph by looking at the friend/follow graphs for a user (finding friends … Continue reading →

Finishing up with last week’s in-class assignment to respond to election-day twitter activity, some other great work from the class: Priya Iyer processed a collection of tweets just before and after the election returns and pulled out the most frequent … Continue reading →

Spark is the hot next thing for Hadoop / MapReduce, and yesterday Matei Zaharia, a PhD student in UC Berkeley’s AMP Lab, gave us a terrific lecture about how it works and what’s coming next.  The key idea is to … Continue reading →

Another great result of the in-class assignment to do something with tweets on election day (good thing I gave students 24 hours to turn it in!) since Arian Shams and Guarav Shetti managed to run their tweet capture code for … Continue reading →

Students in the Twitter class were challenged yesterday to write some code in class to do something interesting with election day tweets.  One group leveraged the code they are developing for their final project to quickly build an app that … Continue reading →

On Thursday we learned about an alternative language for analyzing big data: Scalding. It’s built on Scala and is used extensively by the Twitter Revenue group. Oscar Boykin presented a lecture that he and Argyris Zymnis put together for us: … Continue reading →

Today Stan Nikolov, who just finished his masters at MIT in studying information diffusion networks,  walked us through one particular theoretical model of information diffusion which tries to predict under what conditions an idea stops spreading based on a network’s … Continue reading →

Kurt Thomas is a former Twitter engineer and a current PhD student at UC Berkeley who studies how the criminal underground conspires to make money via unintended uses of computer systems.  He is also a very talented lecturer as this … Continue reading →