PROJECT PLATFORM RELEASE: “A TOOLKIT FOR ANALYZING ONLINE CONVERSATIONS FOR SOLUTIONS-BASED POLICY DEVELOPMENT”

JANUARY 28, 2022

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Social media platforms are public venues where conversations about issues of public interest take place. These online conversations have real world impact. The project objective is to understand the vocabularies, speakers, interlinking of conversations, associated topics/themes, and make this all public to draw these narratives together and support solutions-based policy conversations.

The tool can aggregate these indicators at the level of tweet authors to shed light on the activities and style of influencers of public opinion. Finally, it offers rich visualizations to enable users to gain insights on their datasets. 

WHO IS THE TOOL DESIGNED FOR?

This is public research project. Everyone has equal access to these conversations. Everyone can suggest an examination of a new energy type, new visualizations, and new analysis. This research is by Canadians and for Canadians to support conversations about Canadian energy policy. By helping us make this project better, you will enhance the accessibility and relevancy of energy policy to all Canadians. So, please make suggestions: http://ai4buzz.ca/suggestions

PROJECT TEAM

The project leveraged expertise from engineering, computer science and business faculties and was peer reviewed by the University of British Columbia, University of Ottawa, University of New Brunswick, Cornell University, and Stanford University. The project is enabled through the generous donation of high-performance computing infrastructure through ISAIC); University of Alberta Signature Area AI4Society; and support from the Mitacs Accelerate Program.  Researchers included: Drs. Lianne Lefsrud, Eleni Stroulia, Denilson Barbosa, Joel Gehman and Candelario Gutierrez, Andrea Whittaker, Ruby de Jesus, and Katherine Patenio.

HOW TO USE:

FOR MORE:

Gutierrez, C. A. G., Whittaker, A., Patenio, K. M., Gehman, J., Lefsrud, L. M., Barbosa, D., & Stroulia, E. (2021, November). Analyzing and visualizing Twitter conversations. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (pp. 4-13).