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Tag: Carnegie Mellon

  • Robot Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony is Tonight

    Robot Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony is Tonight

    Though a certain Iron Man (whose new trailer was released today) has been taking the spotlight in recent years, other iron men and women who don’t have squishy humans inside of them have pervaded western culture for decades. Robots big and small, good and evil, free-willed or enslaved have featured in hundreds of works of literature, cinema, and other media since the early 20th century.

    Tonight, a few of those automatons will get their due and be inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. As part of the RoboBusiness Leadership Summit currently taking place in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Melon will hold an induction ceremony for the 2012 class of Robot Hall of Fame Inductees. The ceremony starts tonight at 6:30 pm at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.

    Part of the voting on which robots are to be inducted tonight was open to the public, but is now closed. The rest of the voting was done by a group of 107 robotics experts, industry leaders, and “aficionados.” Some of this year’s nominees included Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies, Rosie from The Jetsons, and WALL-E from the Pixar movie of the same name.

    In addition to the 2012 inductees, robots from the 2010 class will also be celebrated. These include NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, iRobot’s Roomba, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 series Terminator.

  • Researchers Study Dialects, Slang On Twitter

    Much as someone born and raised in Boston probably won’t sound the same as a person who grew up in California, people don’t always tweet alike.  And while that may appear obvious, Carnegie Mellon researchers studied the presence of slang and different dialects on Twitter and discovered some interesting facts.

    One point about the methodology: this was a little more involved than just looking up a few Twitter users and making observations.  The researchers developed an automated method for analyzing word usage on the site, and wound up with a sample of 9,500 users and 380,000 tweets.

    As for what they found, an official release indicated, "In northern California, something that’s cool is ‘koo’ in tweets, while in southern California, it’s ‘coo.’  In many cities, something is ‘sumthin,’ but tweets in New York City favor ‘suttin.’"

    What’s more, "While many of us might complain in tweets of being ‘very’ tired, people in northern California tend to be ‘hella’ tired, New Yorkers ‘deadass’ tired and Angelenos are simply tired ‘af.’"  (Note: "af" stands for "as f__k".)

    You can see more popular terms arranged by region and subject below.  Some are obvious ("cab" in New York) . . . others, less so (who know Chipotle was so popular around Lake Erie?).

    There’s also an 11-page paper the researchers published if you’d really like to get into the math of the automated method and learn more about patterns related to dialect and slang.

  • Researchers Suggest Twitter Data Might Replace Polls

    The next time there’s a big election or important issue up for debate, think about thanking Twitter’s founders if your phone doesn’t ring.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have determined that, at least in some instances, combing Twitter for data can be as good a way of researching opinions as conducting an actual poll.

    Twitter LogoBrendan O’Connor, Ramnath Balasubramanyan, Bryan R. Routledge, and Noah A. Smith examined consumer confidence and political opinions that were measured in 2008 and 2009, putting information from the Consumer Board, Gallup, Reuters, the University of Michigan, and Twitter side by side.

    The researchers then concluded in a paper, "[W]e find that a relatively simple sentiment detector based on Twitter data replicates consumer confidence and presidential job approval polls.  While the results do not come without caution, it is encouraging that expensive and time-intensive polling can be supplemented or supplanted with the simple-to-gather text data that is generated from online social networking."

    More research on the subject will probably occur as a result, and if this finding holds, Twitter is almost sure to receive a lot of exposure.  Given how could and easy analyzing Twitter data should be, the site may get name-checked on news programs and financial channels left and right.

    This development is sort of a win for Twitter even if the researcher’s initial conclusion is disproved, too, considering that not long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Carnegie Mellon taking an interest in the site.