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Pythia Analytica
A Machine that can read your Sentiments
Have you ever found yourself puzzled to understand others’ emotions? If you could have a machine that can help you read others’ emotions, what would you do with it? Find a boyfriend/girlfriend? What kind of influence could one have if they have such a machine?
[1]
The term ‘pythia’ comes from an ancient priestess who could bring oracles or predict the future. For Laksana Lazuardy or Ardy (11A), Pythia Analytica is a computer program that can predict human’s sentiments simply by analysing a text written by the individual. “Just using three sentences or a paragraph, we can predict the individuals’ level of happiness, level of stress, even we can measure how objective their statements are,” said Ardy, who is also the CEO and founder of Pythia Analytica.
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This program started a year ago and the inspiration came from the students' wellbeing thermometer form. “The thermometer form consists of many questions and I think the school might have difficulty processing the data and analyzing the students’ actual emotion.” From that, working together with In Seo as his COO, Ardy used IBM Watson platform to develop this information system. As a pilot, they accessed the twitter database and analysed the public tweets. “We found that the result was quite accurate, depending on the clarity of the text and how we prepared the data,” he said confidently. After that, Ardy and In Seo proposed this software to compete with the Investment Competition held by Wharton Global Youth Program.
Ardy believes that this app can have many benefits which can make life a lot easier. “Let's say, Google can know my data. Google can use this program to track my emotions: whether I am in a rush and when someone is in a rush they would tend to buy something. Google can use that. And so would advertisers. The advertisers can use this software to target consumers by understanding their levels of sentiment and create the right ad for them.” This software can also be useful for school level bases, such as understanding students’ wellbeing and also the student council's recruitment process. “Ibu Shweta, our supervisor, suggested a collaboration, where the school would develop the survey and use our software for analytical processing of the data.”
Ardy is confident that this software can still grow and develop in many ways. “The computer science faculties around the world have trained their AI machine to understand human emotions more and more. So, I believe this is developing.” What is your personal goal regarding this project, Ardy? “For me, this starts just as a random coding project. I think, just finding a use of this program beyond the investment competition would be an indicator of success for me.”
Dwi Astuti
[1] Laksana Lazuardy Rachman
[2] Pythia Analytica's sentiment analysis program (based on IBM Watson)-Documentation by: Ardy
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