A team of social science students from the Web Mining Lab of Department of Media and Communication (COM) won three awards at the Big Data & Computer Intelligence (BDCI) competition organised by the China Computer Federation (CCF) on 23 & 24 December 2017 in Changshu, China. Held annually since 2014, CCF-BDCI is the largest computing contest in China.

The team consisted of three students: YIN Chuang (PhD), SHEN Anqi (MACNM) and DUAN Zening (MACNM). Together, they won the First Place Theme Award and the Best Creative Exploration Award. Professor Jonathan ZHU, Chair Professor of Computational Social Science of COM and team supervisor, won an Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award in the competition.

The 2017 competition attracted more than 6,600 teams from China and overseas; more than half of the teams came from industry, and the rest from universities. An overwhelming majority of the 15,000 participants were computer scientists or engineers. The COM team has been the first-ever with a social sciences background to win a prize in this series of contests.

Under the designated theme of “Opinion Mining of the Sino-India Doklam Stand-off Event”, the team members combined communication theory and computational algorithms in their analysis to quantify how third-party opinions evolved dynamically based on a rich pool of data from Twitter and other online media platforms.

Cover: The team of COM students won the Best Creation & Discovery Award and the First Place Theme Award at the Big Data & Computer Intelligence competition.