At the completion of this course, I could

• gain conceptual knowledge and theoretical foundations in social networking and be able to apply them in explaining various online social phenomena

• be able to analyze and interpret social media contents, social network structures, and human information behaviors

• be able to understand the impact of information engineering solutions in a global and societal context

Through the small social network formed by this course, I met a lot of new friends. By reading their blog posts, I got a lot of gain and inspiration. They are

• Fan Qi
• Fu Weiting
• Hu Huiyi
• Li Zenan
• Li Tongtong
• Ma Tianye
• Zhou Shuang

Through two interesting course projects, I learned to perform sentiment analysis on text and social network, which all stimulated my interest.

Discuss how social media analytics can be applied to address the UN SDG I mentioned, Zero Hunger.

As I mentioned in the last blog, the key points of achieving zero hunger are food security and rural production commercialization. I think rural e-commerce based on social media analysis can help to solve problems in the two points.

Since 2015, rural e-commerce has been vigorously promoted with the introduction of national policies and financial support from the Ministry of Commerce. For many e-commerce enterprises, rural areas are a potential market for tapping incremental users. Therefore, rural e-commerce has already become the focus of traditional e-commerce giants such as Taobao and Jingdong.

However, after a period of exploration, rural e-commerce has encountered many insurmountable dilemmas, such as the “unsellable” of agricultural products, and the phenomenon of hoarding caused serious rottenness. This phenomenon is not only easy to dampen farmers’ production being enthusiastic, consumers can not buy the products they want because the information channels are not smooth.

The emergence of social e-commerce may become a helper to help rural e-commerce break through the predicament. This is exactly where social media analytics comes in.

On the one hand, from the perspective of consumers, interesting online social shopping is more adapted to consumer psychology, and it also meets the consumer’s ultimate definition of online shopping. It broke the traditional consumer shopping model, turning personal online shopping into a multi-person participation, with social fun.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the merchant, it is the pursuit of fast and effective product promotion. Social e-commerce has a unique advantage in this regard. Due to the stability of the social relationship chain and high communication, social e-commerce has made the product promotion effect faster and more effective.

Therefore, under the natural social gene, many social-based e-commerce platforms have gradually emerged. Social e-commerce represented by Pinduoduo and Jixiang Mall is trying to get a share of the “e-commerce + social” bonus. And has created one e-commerce miracle after another.

Public information shows that Pinduoduo had more than 100 million paying users in 2016, monthly GMV exceeded 1 billion, and average daily orders exceeded 1 million. This way of getting traffic through social platforms has detonated the social network and burst into amazing power.

From the point of view, the merging business model of social e-commerce can be recognized by the public, and it is inseparable from its more emphasis on the different needs of consumers and businesses. As mentioned earlier, rural e-commerce is currently facing problems such as the serious accumulation of agricultural products and unsmooth product promotion channels that cause consumers to “want to buy but not buy”. The unique business model of social e-commerce is expected to become such a channel for solving problems.

Therefore, under the mobile social traffic dividend, cutting into rural e-commerce from the perspective of social e-commerce is a good way to “out of poverty” for rural e-commerce. And social e-commerce has also begun a brutal growth stage due to a large number of players, and it is urgent to find new points of force.

A profound change of the global food and agriculture system is needed if we are to nourish the 821 million people who are hungry today and additional 2 billion people expected to be undernourished by 2050.

As a large agricultural country and a large population, China plays an important role in the process of achieving the goal. From my perspective, I would like to analyze three essential concepts and two problems China’s agriculture facing.

Concept 1: Land Circulation and Concentration

This concept refers to the concentration of lease of land management rights, not the change of land ownership. China’s rural farmland is collectively owned, this is not changeable in the short term and medium term.

Concept 2: Large-scale Agriculture.

This concept differs from small farmers business model. The focus on large-scale agriculture is not on the size of the land area, but on the change of business philosophy. In my opinion, small-scale farming is to plant alone and feed a small family, and large-scale operation is to ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices.

Concept 3: Food Security.

For the average person, food security is that there is food to eat every year. Food security is a kind of capacity, not a status quo. There is a lot of food in the warehouse can not be called food security, which is called food surplus.

As for problems:

Problem 1: There are not too few people to grow fields, but too many.

In 2014, the mechanization rate of rice production of Guangdong Province was 65.8%, and in the cultivation, harvesting and other aspects, the mechanization rate had already exceeded 90%. For example, a professional household in Taishan, Guangdong Province, grows 220 acres of rice, the main labor force is a 54-year-old father and 28-year-old son, only during the fertilization period to hire a temporary worker. Although the incoming of two seasons of rice per acre is less than 1000 RMB, but because of the area is large enough, their family lives very well. Even if food price doubles tomorrow, farmers’ families whose per capita farming area is only 5 acres will not be able to live.

Problem 2: Contradictions in understanding the attributes of the agricultural industry.

The public and government have never regarded agriculture as a normal industry, but rather as a vassal of “rural issues” and “peasant issues”. On the one hand, everyone, sympathizes with the low income of farmers, but on the other hand, the rise of agricultural product prices will be suppressed.

Agriculture is industrializing all over the world, and agricultural products around the world are “commercialized”, but they have always looked at agriculture with political thinking that nobody will grow grain once food commercialized and food will be controlled by foreign countries.

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is established on the social medium that contain huge number of user generated contents like texts, images, audios and videos.

Social media analytics consists of the technical part and humanistic part, which uses some specifically designed tools or software platforms, such as crawlers, search engines, and analytic tools, to extract high level or potential information that is meaningful and valuable for decision making and social phenomenon analysis.

For the technical part, social media analytics need to use and develop tools to solve different problems, illustrate information, visualize data. Besides, mathematical models are also essential.

For the humanistic part, it can guide us to make predictions and decisions. In addition, researchers can find new knowledge and contribute to human society.

Social media analytics is prevalent and neccessary in bussiness context. By monitoring different social medium, companies can gather information to help them:

• enhance products
• make business decisions
• plan new strategies
• analyze competitors
• find potential customers
• improve efficiency

There are a variety of technologies used in social media analytics. Engineers and developers keep creating new tools from continuous new requirements and motivations. Prevalent technologies include:

• natural language processing
• sentiment analysis
• semantic segmentation
• emotion evaluation
• knowledge graph
• recommendation
• retrieval