![Different patterns of Twitter activity between the four cities [image courtesy Twitter].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/sleeping_grid-miguel.png "Different patterns of Twitter activity between the four cities [image courtesy Twitter].")
From time to time, we feature on this Blog an exciting research result that’s been picked up the mainstream media. Here’s one that’s garnered some interest this week, having first appeared on The New York Times‘ Bits Blog: engineers at Twitter are presenting papers at the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-12) in Dublin — as well as the co-located workshop on Social Media Visualization — attempting to scientifically characterize the real-time nature of the popular social media platform.
Some highlights of their work on real-time tweets and search queries, according to the engineers (following the link):
