Read the exclusive short interview with Texifter, LLC, CEO, Stuart Shulman and hear more at Social Media within Defence and Military 2014. Follow the conversation at #milsocialmedia

1. INTERVIEW WITH STU SHULMAN, CEO FROM TEXIFTER LLC
In the run up to the 4th annual event on Social Media within the Defence and Military
Sector, Stu Shulman, CEO from Texifter LLC, was asked a few questions about the
conference taking place on 17th and 18th November and about the industry.
Stu Shulman will be speaking at the event on SIFTING SOCIAL DATA: WORD
SENSE DISAMBIGUATION USING MACHINE LEARNING
1. About you – what is your role and current activities?
I am the founder & CEO of Texifter (http://texifter.com), and also a Research Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I also serve as a
Board Member and Treasurer for the Big Boulder Initiative (http://bigboulderinitiative.org),
which is a new social data industry association. I teach social and text data analytics and
invent new methods and software to enact novel filtering capabilities. My customers are
corporate, governmental, and academic. In general, I help humans and machines become
more reliable and efficient by creating measurements of both and incorporating these key
measures into an analytic workflow.
2. What do you think are the most interesting sessions in this conference?
I am most interested in sessions that deal with the identification of valid/relevant data and the
tools and techniques that work best for filtering out the noise. My goal is to build the best,
fastest, and most flexible spam filters for text and social data. In this context, spam is
anything that is not relevant to a particular task or research goal.
3. What do you believe are the biggest challenges in the Defence industry regarding Social
Media?
Pulling signal from all the ambiguous and other noise is the ultimate challenge. We refer to
this as "cleaning" social data. Many people skip over this essential step. Others slog through
by hand or with limited tools, like simple or Boolean search. The challenge is to deliver the
ability to create custom machine classifiers to non-data science practitioners.
4. What will attendees take away from your talk?
They will know how and why to use the five pillars of text analytics to clean social data.
They will also have a sense of how to form Gnip PowerTrack queries that can make the
initial collection process more precise.
5. How will this event help in resolving business challenges?
I'm hoping for a few new customers and a good set of networking connections to bring the
lessons learned from 14 years of text analytics research into the Defence sector.

2. 6. What is the future?
Machine-learning, crowd sourcing, and elastic search are building blocks of future social data
analytics.
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Hear more from Stu Shulman at the 4th
annual event on Social Media within the Defence and
Military Sector this autumn. Download the brochure today at www.military-socialmedia.com
Social Media within the Defence and Military Sector
17TH
& 18TH
NOV 2014
Marriott Hotel, Regents Park Hotel, London UK
www.military-socialmedia.com
Follow the conversation at #milsocialmedia