TITLE: Contemporary Applications of Social Media Research SPEAKER: Donal Simmie (Imperial College London) ABSTRACT: Social Networks and the data they provide are providing a valuable tool for researchers and industry to solve challenging problems. This talk will cover the core concepts of Social Networks, how they can be represented mathematically and how the insights they provide can be used to provide solutions to a variety of problems. It will discuss some of the research being carried out now in domains such as: advertising, counter-terrorism, policing and epidemiology. The talk will focus on the work carried out at the Institute for Security Science and Technology At Imperial College. This research has automatically extracted influential individuals from Twitter communities and provided an early warning and disease tracking system that utilises posts from Twitter users to support epidemiology professionals.