Bulletin No. 1, 2021

6 CHINESE UNIVERSITY BULLETIN NO.1, 2021 AI: SOCIETY 8 :30 a.m., Monday. For the third time in a week, the train is held up in the middle of the tunnel. Try as you might to be on time, there seems always to be a way to undo the head start you have made. Trapped like the rest of the hundreds of commuters on board, heavy-eyed, you think there is nothing you can do except, maybe, tweet furiously about it: ‘Well don, 3rd delay this week. You ppl at the railways had ONE job.’ Besides being a way to let off some steam, this tweet may seem inconsequential. But for Luo Shuli , ramblings on social media like this can make a difference and lead to better transport—given the right tool to process and understand them. A PHD CANDIDATE at the Department of Geography and Resource Management, Shuli has been using social media data to better understand the perception of a city’s public transport system. For her dissertation research, which won her a Best Paper award at the Second International ConferenceonUrbanInformatics,shefocusedonShenzhen and collected tens of thousands of public Weibo posts about the city’s metro system. What she was interested in were the sentiments they convey and such metadata as when and where they were published, which might point to areas of the system that needed improvement.