PLENARY LECTURE

Facebook, Twitter and other social media have expanded rapidly the last decade. As a result users share more and more information, exploring new communication ways. Furthermore these platforms have evolved to real time "news networks", where all news items are posted nearly as they happen! Statistics are unambiguous: (a) by April 2015 Twitter was receiving over 800 million search queries per day, meaning that Internet users are changing their search and retrieval habits and (b) according to Infographic Labs only in Facebook 400 million images are uploaded daily, while users spend about 15.5 billion hours per month.
On the other hand, traditionally TV networks used to play the major role of what was going to be broadcasted and what was not. Now with the advent of social media, users are increasingly in control of how and when they view, create and post their favorite content and not passive consumers. However, due to large numbers of posts, several problems have appeared, such as cluttered walls, difficulty in following the day's activity, incapacity in detecting content of interest etc. Till now social media content has already been used in a variety of applications such as for the ranking of news stories, for the profiling of user preferences and even for products' recommendations. However, this type of conversational, user-generated content found in social media, might be used to add value to other media and technologies. Some people look at the social media as Global Brains, were human intelligence interacts with information. Some others feel that social media can play specific roles such as the role of Recommendation Engines, Consumer Behavior Analyzers, Crowdsourcing Environments, Social Relations Discoverers etc. Finally some others see them as a threat: the eyes and ears of a global spy. What is the present and what can be the future of Social Media and Social Computing?