Towards Geo-Social Intelligence: Mining, Analyzing, and Leveraging Geospatial Footprints in Social Media

The widespread adoption of GPS-enabled tagging of social media content via smartphones and social media services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare) uncovers a new window into the spatiotemporal activities of millions of people. These “footprints” open new possibilities for understanding how ideas flow across the globe, how people can organize for societal impact, and lay the foundation for new crowd-powered geosocial systems. We describe recent efforts to mine, model, and analyze large-scale geospatial footprints toward enabling new intelligent geo-social systems that leverage these footprints.