Using Face Recognition with Twitter Data for the Study of International Migration

Abstract

The level of widely used technology has tremendously increased in recent years, and the inter-net has genuinely reshaped the way we learn, communicate and live. As a result, social data availability, complexity, and diversity steadily grow. In the same time, the computational ma-chine power constantly unlocks opportunities to provide innovative techniques. By leveraging that power in statistics, powerful algorithms, such as neural networks, started to be applied in various fields. Image Processing has been a subject of broad interest and face recognition has been an essential part of this field in recent years. This paper aims to leverage all these resources to provide an overview of how social media data can be collected and analyzed using R. The result of this paper is represented by an innovative algorithm able to retrieve and analyze Twitter information. Moreover, this paper also provides a snapshot of the Romanian Twitter users’ demographics and mobility.