Luke Zhang

IST researchers categorize social media searches

By integrating social media, Penn State researchers have found a way to better satisfy individual users' multimedia searches on the Web. Penn State Information Sciences and Technology faculty members Lee Giles and Luke Zhang and their students recently introduced SNDocRank, a framework to incorporate social networks into multimedia search rankings. "With the assumption that 'birds of a feather flock together,' the SNDocRank framework ranks the videos based on the similarity of the owners of videos in social networks," Giles said. "Users tend to be friends if they have common interests, and they are more interested in their friends' information than that of others they don't know." (more)