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

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是提供对在线世界的更好理解。具体地说，它能够在不同国家和语言的市场部门实现潜在的商业应用。这项技术完全建立在可公开获取的信息上，不需要任何个人信息。潜在的应用包括需要更好地了解现有用户/粉丝基础及其特定产品的反对者的公司，希望更好地了解市场部门的营销公司，希望了解对治疗的态度的医疗保健公司，以及对评估全球风险感兴趣的公司。这项技术远远超出了目前社会倾听和调查的实践和技术。这个i-Corps项目将网络世界中多体行为的想法与网络科学的进步联系起来并结合在一起。这些技术的结合使核心技术能够为跨多个平台和语言的在线人群行为提供一个窗口。该技术的特点是自动收集在线集群信息，然后描述和预测其发展。从这个意义上说，它是一种受物理学启发的人工智能。现在，该系统不再是粒子集合，而是各种不同的在线用户的集合。该奖项的重点完全放在整体生态上，以获取特定产品的潜在临界点和市场情绪的变化，以及支持特定产品竞争的潮起潮落。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.