2018-02-27: Summary of Gathering Alumni Information from a Web Social Network
While researching my dissertation topic (slides 2--28) on social media profile discovery, I encountered a related paper titled Gathering Alumni Information from a Web Social Network written by Gabriel Resende Gonçalves , Anderson Almeida Ferreira , and Guilherme Tavares de Assis , which was published in the proceedings of the 9th IEEE Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB) . In this paper, the authors detailed their approach to define a semi-automated method to gather information regarding alumni of a given undergraduate program at Brazilian higher education institutions. Specifically, they use the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) to identify candidate LinkedIn pages based on a comparative evaluation of similar pages in their training set. The authors contend alumni are efficiently found through their process, which is facilitated by focused crawling of data publicly available on social networks posted by the alumni themselves. The proposed methodology consists of three main modul