NIPS 2011 Big Learning - Algorithms, Systems, & Tools Workshop: Towards Human Behavior...

Big Learning Workshop: Algorithms, Systems, and Tools for Learning at Scale at NIPS 2011 Invited Talk: Towards Human Behavior Understanding from Pervasive Data: Opportunities and Challenges Ahead by Nuria Oliver Nuria Oliver is currently the Scientific Director for the Multimedia, HCI and Data Mining & User Modeling Research Areas in Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). Her research interests include mobile computing, multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval, smart environments, context awareness, statistical machine learning and data mining, artificial intelligence, health monitoring, social network analysis, computational social sciences, and human computer interaction. She is currently working on the previous disciplines to build human-centric intelligent systems. Abstract: We live in an increasingly digitized world where our -- physical and digital -- interactions leave digital footprints. It is through the analysis of these digital footprints that we can learn and model some of the many facets that characterize people, including their tastes, personalities, social network interactions, and mobility and communication patterns. In my talk, I will present a summary of our research efforts on transforming these massive amounts of user behavioral data into meaningful insights, where machine learning and data mining techniques play a central role. The projects that I will describe cover a broad set of areas, including smart cities and urban computing, psychographics, socioeconomic status prediction and disease propagation. For each of the projects, I will highlight the main results and point at technical challenges still to be solved from a data analysis perspective.