Paying for Gas With Positivity
IBM Watson is a powerful tool for analyzing unstructured data. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to sift through large amounts of data while uncovering useful information. The automobile company, Chevrolet, used this platform to develop a web application that crunches data from social media networks to understand users’ personality traits. They are offering free gas to people in certain locations if their personality is deemed “positive” by their algorithm.
This application introduces an interesting way to utilize data from networks to learn information about a specific node. By analyzing connections between nodes, the program can compile the data and make surprisingly accurate predictions. In this case, the connections between the nodes are posts and shared content among users. In this course, we studied the shapes of networks and strengths of connections between nodes. This program takes it a step further and learns valuable information about the individual nodes by studying the entire graph. The website reveals that you can learn a lot about a person through studying his interactions with other people.
Link: http://www.popsci.com/chevy-will-give-you-free-gas-but-only-if-youre-happy-on-twitter-1