WSU project to gauge "social perceptions" through Twitter

DAYTON — Wright State University researchers are working to make sense of data produced by social networking sites such as Twitter, as well as information from medical databases and sensor webs.

New technologies developed at Wright State’s Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing — including Twitris, a program that provides local and global “social perceptions” by monitoring Twitter — have the potential to create new businesses and jobs for the region, said university President David R. Hopkins.

“The research that this group is doing on the cutting edge is going from the information age to the meaning age,” Hopkins said Monday, March 29, in a meeting with the Dayton Daily News editorial board.

Wright State will introduce its knowledge-enabled computing center April 12 at a campus event to include Eric D. Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents, and officials from Hewlitt-Packard, IBM and LexisNexis.

The center has one of the nation’s largest academic research groups in the semantic web, also known as Web 3.0, according to university officials. It is expected to generate $13 million of research in five years and $19.5 million in 10 years, officials said.

In the semantic web, the meaning of Internet information and services is defined, making it possible for the web to “understand” and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

“We teach the machines that here are some of the facts that you should know before you process less organized information like those from social media,” said Meena Nagarajan, a Wright State doctoral student who helped develop Twitris and demonstrated the program for reporters.

Nagarajan said the university has filed for intellectual property on Twitris, but has not yet marketed the technology.

“When we see something like Twitris, we want to license it,” Hopkins said. “We want it to be available for industry and commercialization, but we’d certainly like to get our share of the revenue from that.”

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