On the afternoon of April 18, 2019, Professor Jim Jansen, Editor-in-chief of Information Processing & Management was invited to give a lecture at the School of Information Management, Wuhan University. The lecture was hosted by Professor Lu Wei, Associate Dean of the School of Information Management. More than 50 teachers and students attended the lecture.

The title of Professor Jansen's lecture is "Social Media Analytics for the Automatic Generation of Imaginary People to Understand Real Users". He mainly introduced the research focus of his current research team, which was Automatic Persona Generation (APG). Professor Jansen pointed out that before understanding APG, one should first understand Persona. Persona is a virtual representation of real user groups. It creates a virtual character with detailed descriptions, which is a very intuitive representation of the common characteristics of a group of users. In order to make the avatar looks more realistic, the persona description usually includes demographic characteristics, behavioral characteristics, and emotional characteristics. The advantage of persona is that it can simplify the numerical data into a form (give faces to data) that can be easy to understand, so that the user image can be deeply rooted in the mind and facilitate communication within the organization to make better decisions.

Professor Jansen further shared the characteristics and application cases of APG. APG is a system for automatically generating personas based on user data. It has taken a big step in the original persona generation method, making the persona generation no longer time-consuming and laborious, but became an approximately real-time process.

Professor Jansen pointed out that although APG has taken an important step in the automatic persona generation, there are still many problems to be solved and improved, such as how to retrieve, generate and select the profile pictures of the personas, how to infer the attributes of the persona, for example, the user's requirements and goals, how to choose suitable information elements and layout for personas of different industries and so on.

At the end of the lecture, Professor Jansen introduced relevant information of IP&M and answered the questions of attendees.

About Jim Jansen

Professor Jim Jansen is the editor-in-chief of Information Processing & Management.

Dr. Jansen is a Principal Scientist in the social computing group of the Qatar Computing Research Institute, and a professor with the College of Science and Engineering, Hamad bin Khalifa University, and an adjunct professor with the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. His research areas include Web analytics, Keyword advertising and Personas from data. Professor Jim Jansen has authored or co-authored more than 300 research publications, with articles appearing in a multi-disciplinary range of journals and conferences. He has received several awards and honors, including an ACM Research Award, six application development awards and a university-level teaching award, along with other writing, publishing, research, teaching, and leadership honors.

  Contributed by: Wang Ying and Yu Yuan

Journal Center, School of Information Management