Cheng-Jun Got Best Paper Award of the Student Symposium

Cheng-Jun Got Best Paper Award of the Student Symposium

The 3rd Honours Symposium for Asian Ph.D Students in Communication Research is held in Yonsei university, Seoul, Korea, Oct 27-28. 9 Ph.D students of City University of Hong Kong participated in this conference, and Cheng-Jun got the Best Paper Award for his paper titled The Origin of Burst in Public Attention: Peak Fraction, Popularity, Diffusion Channels, and Categories of YouTube Videos. You can find the slides here.

Public attention is the extent to which individuals collectively allocate their attentions to cultural products across space and time. In addition to fragmentation and polarization, recent research shows it is also characterized by the burst phenomena. Measuring burst using peak fraction, Cheng-jun’s study aims in systematically studying how burst of public attention relates with the popularity of YouTube videos, and how it rises from recommendation, social influence, and search. The results indicate: (1) burst is negatively related to the popularity of online videos (e.g., views, lifetime); (2) burst is negatively related to search, but positively related to recommendation; (3) compared with the videos of the other categories, those videos of the news category experienced stronger burst, while copyright protected videos have a weaker burst. The findings suggest the temporality underlying various influential factors result in the burst of public attention. Cheng-Jun (Frank) WANG is a Ph.D Candidate (expected graduation June, 2013) in the department of media & communication, City University of Hong Kong. Currently, Cheng-Jun is also a research member of web mining lab. His research focuses on information diffusion (e.g., news diffusion), public attention, and public discussion.