The MIT Technology Review one of the most popular, valid and widely read research blogs is currently featuring Yahoo! Researchers' work, developed in the framework of SocialSensor, on recommending pleasant urban paths.

If you prefer beautiful routes over short ones, GPS mapping algorithms are of little use. But Yahoo! researchers have come up with an approach that could change that.

Source: MIT Technology Review

In the context of the SocialSensor FP7 Project, Yahoo! Researchers  Daniele Quercia, Rossano Schifanella and Luca Aiello have designed an innovative algorithm that recommends pleasant routes in the city leveraging user generated content from social media.The suggested work has already been implemented and tested in the feteBerlin mobile app developed by SocialSensor for the Fête de la Musique in Berlin and has now attracted the attention of MIT Technology Review editors that present the idea in a nice blog post. Click here to read more. 

SocialSensor was happy to support also this year the Fête de la Musique festival that took place in Berlin to celebrate the European Music Day on the 21st of June. With a new handy app that features interesting paths to follow in the center of Berlin, upload photo and bookmarking favorites capabilities to plan in advance as well as trusty maps to navigate from stage to stage, the app was the tool to maximize the event experience.  

This year, apart from the app we focused mostly on providing R&D features from lab to market to address the needs of the event planners.

Heading to the Fête de la Musique in Berlin next Saturday? Make sure to download the official app of the festival available for Facebook and Android. To help festival-goers navigate more than 150 stages, and numerous artists we’re happy to be providing the app for the festival so you can start planning now. Last year's users can expect to have a complete festival guide at the click of a button, but they should also expect 2014's mobile experience to be a lot more enhanced.

Given that we had a lot of the components in place and a "certain level" of trust in the power of social media*,  we decided to go for a wild experiment: predict the results of the upcoming (now gone) Euro elections using social signals, and publish the result before the polls closed. So, 48 days before the elections, we started monitoring the online discussions on Twitter around the names of the most popular parties (using their official names, Twitter account names and some frequently used abbreviations). All in all, we collected around 370K tweets during the pre-election period. At the same time, we also collected poll results from multiple sources in order to use them as a kind of "ground truth" for building our predictive models.

Time: 15:51 (Greece)

We are happy to publish a set of predictions regarding the outcomes of the Euro-Parliament elections 2014 for Greece making use of an approach developed by SocialSensor. Obviously, such results should be read with great caution as they stem from a highly experimental setting and are only the beginning of some very interesting research that will continue.

How we did it?

We monitored the Twitter stream for mentions of the main contesting Greek parties and computed features reflecting the volume and sentiment around them over time (for instance, number of positive mentions for party X). Then, using published poll results, we trained some predictive models using different algorithms (Linear Regression, ε-SVM, Sequential Minimal Optimization, Gaussian Process). For each party, we present the minimum and maximum predicted percentage, together with an average prediction. The results refer to percentages for targeted votes (i.e. not including white/invalid votes).

Here are the results....

Disclaimer: In case it was not clear from the above, those results were produced by means of automatic data analysis methods and they do not reflect any political bias of the researchers. In addition, they should not be considered as reliable vote estimates but rather a research experiment.

One new and different distinction for the SocialSensor project! We are happy to announce that the promotional video produced for ThessFest the offical application developed for the Thessaloniki International Festival has won a merit in the Greek Graphic Design Awards 2014 EBGE in the Motion Graphics category. Congratulations to HelloKinetik for an excellent production and to all participants, winners and organizers for a great event.

ThessFest || Promotional Video for tiff54