Capturing the visual language of social media

With the rapid growth in the usage of social networks worldwide, uploading and sharing of user-generated content, both text and visual, has become increasingly prevalent. An analysis of the content a user shares and engages with can provide valuable insights into an individual´s preferences and lifestyle. In this paper, we present a system to automatically infer a user´s interests by analysing the content of the photos they share online. We propose a way to leverage web image search engines for detecting high-level semantic concepts, such as interests, in images, without relying on a large set of labeled images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through quantitative and qualitative results on data collected from Instagram.