Private: Blog


Social Media, Stress, and College Life: The Freshman 200 Study

A Q&A with a UCIPT Postdoctoral Researcher What are the most common topics of discussion for the Freshman 200 study participants? How closely do Twitter Trends and/or top headlines on Yahoo News align with Freshman 200 study participant discussion topics? Not surprisingly, one of the most common topics […]


Prediction Technology and Gun Violence

A Q&A with a UCIPT Postdoctoral Researcher What can UCIPT do to help predict gun violence on UCLA’s campus? The shooting that happened on the UCLA campus on June 1, 2016, was tragic. Predicting gun violence is an extremely complex problem. I think expertise from people in the […]


Digital Persuasion: How Social Media Predicts Consumer Preferences

A Q&A with a UCIPT Postdoctoral Researcher Using sentiment analysis, are you able to accurately predict the fashion preferences of UCLA students? We have not tried to predict fashion preferences for UCLA students. To do so, we would need data from multiple sources (e.g., Pinterest, Instagram) in order […]


Will Machines Replace Us? The Implications of Machine Learning

A Q&A with Sara Melvin, Data Scientist and UCLA Graduate Student Will humans be needed in the future or will machines replace them? It doesn’t seem plausible that machines will replace every human job. However, machines have been slowly replacing human workers since the Industrial Revolution, thus it’s […]


Predictive Data Modeling: How it Works

A Q&A with Jin Yu, Data Scientist and UCLA Graduate Student What is the goal of UCIPT’s Twitter sentiment model? The goal of the Twitter sentiment model is to predict the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) of a given tweet accurately. However, it is only a part of […]


The Opportunities and Challenges of Working with Big Data

A Q&A with Wenchao Yu, Research Assistant and PhD Candidate What is your process of creating software to analyze tweets? The typical tweet analysis process includes four steps: data collection, data modeling, algorithm design, and performance evaluation. The very first step is to collect the data from Twitter. […]


Social Media and the Social Safety Net

A Q&A with a UCIPT Postdoctoral Researcher Using sentiment analysis, is it possible to predict a human being’s longevity? Do insurance companies check for applicant Twitter handles? I am not aware of any insurance companies that are currently collecting applicants’ Twitter handles. However, users often post suggestions about things […]