COLLEGE PARK, MD., -May 16, 2011- Drexel University’s Associate Professor Dr. Chris Yang presented the use of temporal logic-based topic organization systems for social media on Friday, May 13, at Optimal Solutions Group, LLC's (Optimal's) Brown Bag event. With Web 2.0 technology, anyone can contribute large amounts of data at any time on any website. This leads to an overload of topics, comments, and discussions on a multitude of issues that researchers and social media analysts must sift through, much of which is discarded as spam.

Dr. Yang’s solution is to utilize a content-based topic detection system focusing on temporal logic to organize threads of similar subject matter across time into a single area where one can readily analyze and access them for research. This is of great interest for healthcare and health policy sentiment analysis research as the technology can be used to conduct environmental scans of public attitude that can be accessed and organized for relevancy, thus allowing for effective public policy implementation.

Dr. Yang's other research interests include social media analytics, Web search and mining, health informatics, security informatics, knowledge management, information visualization, privacy preservation, digital library and electronic commerce.

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Optimal Solutions Group, LLC

Founded in 2000, Optimal Solutions Group, LLC is a nonpartisan public policy research and technical assistance firm that stands out through its quantitative expertise and innovative approaches to provide rigorous, data-driven research and technical assistance to government agencies, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations. Located at the University of Maryland’s M Square Research Park in College Park, Optimal is a leader in driving real-time public policy research. Optimal has 60+ employees including multidisciplinary researchers with backgrounds in business, communication, economics, education, health policy, psychology, public policy, sociology, statistics, and urban planning. Optimal has four research centers: Health, Education, Housing, and Workforce Development and Social Policy.

Drexel University

Drexel University (DU) is a private research universitywith the main campus located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. It was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a noted financier and philanthropist. Drexel is best known for the cooperative education program(Co-op). Drexel's Co-op is the only mandatory one in Pennsylvania and regularly ranked as the best co-op programs in the United States. Participating students have a variety of opportunities to gain up to 18-month paid full-time working experience before graduation. The university has a large network of more than 1,300 corporate, governmental, and non-profit partners in 28 states and 25 international locations. The employers consists of top ranked international law firms, banks, corporations, and many Fortune 500 companies, such as Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble.