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My technical research focuses on understanding human behavior (in the widest sense) through interdisciplinary approaches and making the knowledge gained useful in the research, development, and deployment of new applications and technologies.

This means a strong focus on data analysis considering the role of technology in business and society, and drawing from work in the humanities, information and social sciences (anthropology, psychology, etc.). What brings it all together is my fascination with data and pattern analysis considering the "big picture" (socio-economic and cultural factors). Part of my work focuses on thinking about and developing the foundations of human-centered computing.

My work on social media covers 3 areas: data science [social network analysis, user modeling], user experience [interaction models, multimedia, design], and business [visualization, web analytics].

I like to make art, travel, read, and explore different cultures. I have worked and lived in 7 cities in 4 continents [Bogota, New York, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo, Lausanne, Madrid, Barcelona] and traveled in over 70 countries. I manage the Social Media Engagement group at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona.

e-mail: ajaimes [ at ] caa dot columbia dot edu

NEW! Co-organizing the following:

Intl. Workshop on Social Media Analytics in conjunction with KDD 2012 (Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Datamining 2012) in Beijing, China, August 12-16, 2012.

LA-WEB 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, Oct. 25-27, 2012.

Recent Invited Talks:

  • Intl. Summer School on Ubiquitous Interaction, Oulu, Finland, May 28-June 1, 2012
  • Winter School on Information Retrieval, Zinal, Switzerland, January 2012
  • Keynote, VIII Top-IX Conference,"Big Data in a Living Web", Torino, Italy, Dec. 2011
  • Keynote, IEEE Intl. Conf. on Mobile Multimedia (MUM 2011), Beijing, China, December 2011
  • Madrid Science Week, Panel on Digital Living, November 2011
  • W3C Social Business Jam, leading session on Mobile & Social, November 10, 2011
  • ASSETS Workshop, Pisa, Italy, October 2011
  • ICME 2011 Panel on Social Media, Barcelona, Spain, July 2011
  • Summer School on Social Networks, Alicante, Spain, June 2011
  • BDigital Global Congress 2011, Barcelona, Spain, June 2011
  • Workshop on Global Research Data Infrastructures: The Big Data Challenges, Capri, Italy, May 2011
  • EC Media Search Cluster Meeting, Trento, Italy, April 2011
  • WWW 2011 Panel on Social Media, Hyderabad, India, March 2011

Recent Papers:

  • "Image Ranking Based on User's Browsing Behavior," ACM SIGIR 2012 (with M. Lipczak, M. Trevisiol)
  • "Understanding and Leveraging Tag-based Relations in On-line Social Networks," ACM HyperText 2012 (with M. Lipczak, B. Sigurbjornsson)
  • "Dynamic Contextual Models for User Interaction on the Web," under review (with P. Haider, L. Chiarandini, U. Brefeld)
  • "Discovering Social Photo Navigation Patterns," ICME 2012 (with M. Trevisiol, L. Chiarandini)
  • "Lin-spiration: Using a Mixture of Spiral and Linear Layouts to Explore Time Series," at IUI 2012 (with E. Graells)
  • "Correlating Financial Time Series with Micro-Blogging Activity," at WSDM 2012 (with E.J. Ruiz, V. Hristidis, C. Castillo, A. Gionis).
  • "Do All Birds Tweet the Same? Characterizing Twitter Around the Word," at CIKM'11 (with B. Poblete, R. Garcia, M. Mendoza).
  • "Social Network Analaysis and Mining for Business Applications," Special Issue on Machine Learning for Business Applications, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2011 (with F. Bonchi, A. Gionis, C. Castillo).
  • "Who Uses Web Search for What? and How?" at WSDM 2011 (with I. Weber).
  • "Demographic Information Flows" at CIKM 2010 (with I. Weber).
  • "Sonify Your Face: Facial Expressions for Sound Generation," at ACM Multimedia 2010 (with R. Valenti, N. Sebe)

Recent Professional activities:

Senior program committee member (ACM RecSys 2011, IJCAI 2011, ICWSM 2011, etc.)