Projects

You will be able to choose one of three types of projects, these will have different requirements regarding previous skills, and time commitment. In the past we have had teams with "free riders" who were not carrying their weight, leading to dissatisfaction and demotivation of contributing team members. We therefore encourage you to be upfront, and tell your colleagues how much work you want to invest in your project. The more you do, the more you will learn, but this also takes more time beyond the official requirements. Skills required for the different projects are:

  • Software development
  • Statistics
  • Web design/Information visualization
  • Community building/Marketing/Product design

Coolhunting projects


Requirements:

  • Software development (medium),
  • Statistics (medium),
  • Web design (medium),
  • Community building (low),
  • Level of difficulty (low to intermediate)

Analyzing YouTube Comments

Building a YouTube (Condor) crawler and analyzing YouTube comments and social networks to predict popularity of brands. What is the ratio of likes/dislikes to number of views?

What is the polarity of comments about different types of movies.

Do different types of music videos (Jazz, Classic, Heavy metal) attract different types of comments .

Can we extract personality profiles of commenters?

Are previous research results about personality characteristics and music preferences confirmed

Prediction projects

Requirements:

  • Software development (high),
  • Statistics (high),
  • Web design (low),
  • Community building (low),
  • Level of difficulty (high)

Social Quantum Effects of Measuring Happiness

The happimeter measures feelings and emotions (most prominently happiness) based on body signals such as heartrate, energy level, activity, etc. in combination with external parameters such as weather forecast and light level (www.happimeter.org).

Tracking happiness through experience-based sampling (self-reporting with a mobile phone app) and measuring it with the new Android-based Happimeter.

1. Use Amazon Mechanical Turk for self-reporting of Happiness

2. recruit Facebook groups to self-report happiness

3. track happiness with the Android Happimeter

Redesign the Feedback to the user on the Website and the Smartphone app

Redesign the data-collection smartphone

How does Social Media Influence Public Opinion

Applying the same algorithms Cambridge Analytica used, try to make a valid claim if hijacking Facebook ads can really influence or even decide elections.

As we do not have Facebook data, use Twitter data to look at for example the Gun Control debate in the US, or the MeToo campaign.

A possible approach could be:

  • collect as many tweets about gun control and the NRA as possible
  • build the tribe of gun lovers, and the tribe of gun control believers
  • identify the key characteristics of members of each tribe
  • try to find the flipping point (based on sentiment analysis) where a gun lover becomes a gun control believer
  • identify key criterias of what makes a person flip his/her beliefs (it will be external events such as the shooting massacre in Parkland)
  • how is that belief flipping mirrored in social media (for the public, and for an individual person)

See http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/2018/03/did-cambridge-analyticas-facebook.html


Final Paper

The final paper should be 10 to 20 pages, plus references, coolhunting results, and code snippets when appropriate. The total number of pages also depends on the type of project, for a coolhunting project, the paper is typically longer, for a system development project, it can be shorter and basically just describe the system, for a statistics project it should document the main insights. Paper writing tips are in the presentation just below.