Dr. Theo Araujo
The SEE Suite and the students of the Social Media Analytics course at the Grady College’s Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Georgia hosted Dr. Theo Araujo Monday, April 16, where he presented his research into utilizing machine learning as a tool in social media analytics for both business and academia.
Machine learning is a field of computer science in which computer software is trained to learn on its own how to process data, improving its accuracy and speed the more data it processes, without being explicitly programmed to do so by a human programmer. An example of this would be to train computer software to perform sentiment analysis of social media posts through recognition of certain words and phrases.
A leader in utilizing machine learning in research, Dr. Araujo discussed the capabilities of machine learning in social media analytics with both undergraduate and graduate student attendees, using his own research and research partnerships with UGA professors to help illustrate the technology’s growing capacity and ease of use for analyzing both text and image-based data sets. Afterwards, Dr. Araujo took questions from students.
Dr. Araujo is an Assistant Professor of Corporate Communication at the University of Amsterdam, and a researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. His research interests primarily focus on the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and related technologies within the communication environment, and within communication research. This includes investigating the antecedents and consequences of the deployment of conversational agents by organizations in their relationship with stakeholders, and exploring the patterns of communication and perceptions about interactions with non-human entities. Dr. Araujo is also interested in developments of computational social science, and the implementation of large-scale data collection and analysis for communication research. This includes research on social media usage by organizations, stakeholders, and traditional news media.
The Social media Engagement and Evaluation (SEE) Suite is a part of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications. The suite is an innovative space for students and researchers to gain the skills, experience, and knowledge to become leaders in the changing social communication ecosystem.
