I-Corps: Revealing the dynamics of online crowds through many-body analysis

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide a better understanding of the online world. Specifically, it enables potential commercial applications in market sectors across countries and languages. The technology is built entirely from publicly accessible information, without the need for any individual information. The potential applications include companies requiring a better understanding of the existing user/fan base and opponents of its particular products, marketing companies looking to better understand market sectors, companies in healthcare looking to understand attitudes toward treatments, and corporations interested in assessing global risk. The technology goes well beyond current practices and techniques in social listening and surveys.This I-Corps project connects and combines ideas on many-body behaviors in the online world, together with advances in the science of networks of networks. The combination of these allows the core technology to provide a window into online crowd behaviors across multiple platforms and languages. The technology features an automated process of collecting together the online cluster information and then describing and forecasting its development. In this sense, it is a form of physics-inspired artificial intelligence. Instead of collections of particles, the system now comprises collections of heterogeneous online users. The focus is entirely on the overall ecology, in order to get at potential tipping points and shifts in market sentiment about a particular product, as well as the ebbs and flows in support of a given product's competition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.