PFI:AIR - TT: Market Driven Innovations and Scaling up of Twitris- A System for Collective Social Intelligence

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This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project focuses on translating a technology for social media monitoring and analysis, known as Twitris, to commercial application. Twitris' collective social media intelligence technology includes capabilities well beyond current state-of-the-art social media monitoring and analysis tools. The Twitris platform can provide collective exploitation of real-time social media streams, and a variety of relevant knowledge, to significantly improve decision-making and support timely actions in various domains of economic, human, and social development. Twitris' unique features include real-time semantic analysis of social media content along three dimensions: spatio-temporal-thematic, people-content-network, and sentiment-emotion-intent. These features result in deeper, contextually-relevant analysis and actionable insights when compared to the leading competing technology in this market space. This project addresses several technology gaps as it transitions Twitris from a research prototype to a scaled-up technology capable of supporting commercial applications. Consequently, three areas of research and technology enhancement will be conducted: 1) enhancing the functionalities of Twitris with a broad range of location-specific processing that requires addressing the challenge of scarcity of spatial metadata on Twitter, 2) semantics-enhanced filtering and improved user experience for automatic and semi-automatic filtering of tweets, which requires addressing challenges such as content ambiguity and information overload, and 3) scalable architecture supporting domain-specific, knowledge-enabled modules to handle high volume, variety and velocity of data. In addition, the project will also provide a unique education and training platform for students and recent graduates to prepare them for careers involving entrepreneurship, business and economic development, and careers in startups. Specifically, the project (a) bridges basic research with technology development and intellectual property development that can lead to successful commercialization and (b) involves close collaboration with successful entrepreneurs, business partners, and customers. It will also undertake structured educational activities involving five technical and business courses, while continuing to foster much-needed diversity in high-tech fields and computer science. This project engages several business partners in strategically important markets to carry out trials involving their customers in an effort to evaluate the efficacy and benefits of research and technology enhancements involved in this scale-up.