NExT: NUS-Tsinghua Center for Extreme Search of User-Generated Content

The Web has revolutionized the way we create, disseminate, and consume information. Users have changed from passive recipients of information to active content consumers and creators, and the nature of information has also changed from static text to dynamic multimedia. With the widespread use of social networks, live user-generated content (UGC) has begun to dominate the Internet. Such UGC covers a range of media, from text (tweets, forums, and Facebook messages) to images (Instagram and Flickr), videos (YouTube), location check-ins (Foursquare), and community question-and-answer forums (Yahoo!Answers and WikiAnswers). The NUS-Tsinghua Center for Extreme Search (or NExT Center) is collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Tsinghua University that focuses on the novel, challenging task of analyzing and organizing UGC to make it available for general access. This article summarizes the authors´ initial work on live monitoring of raw UGC and events as they unfold. It highlights six of the research projects carried out by the NExT Center along the lines of crawling, analyzing, and visualizing live UGC data.