Social media has emerged as a major frontier on the World-Wide Web, with applications ranging from helping teenagers track Justin Beiber to e-commerce to fostering revolutions. In this talk I will discuss our work in this area, as carried out at Wisconsin, Kosmix, and @WalmartLabs. I describe how we integrate data from ``traditional'' Web sources to build a global taxonomy, greatly expand it with social-media data, then leverage it to build consumer-facing applications. Example applications include building topic pages, detecting Twitter events, and monitoring tweets of these events. I discuss the critical role of data integration and human computation in processing social media. Finally, I discuss how all of these can help the emerging area of social commerce, and why Walmart recently acquired Kosmix to make inroads into this new and exciting area.

AnHai Doan is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests cover databases, AI, and Web, with a current focus on data integration, large-scale knowledge bases, social media, crowdsourcing, human computation, and information extraction. He received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2003, a CAREER Award in 2004, and a Sloan Fellowship in 2007. AnHai has also been involved in several startups. He was on the Advisory Board of Transformic, a Deep Web startup acquired by Google in 2005, and was Chief Scientist of Kosmix, a social media startup acquired by Walmart in 2011. Currently he also moonlights as Chief Scientist of WalmartLabs, a newly formed research and development lab at Walmart, devoted to analyzing and integrating social and mobile data for e-commerce.