Presentation Video
(The first two minutes of audio is missing).
The VT EPSCoR RACC seminar series featured Dr. Chris Danforth, the Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences at UVM and co-director the Center of Complex Systems at UVM. He presented his work in: Remote Sensing of Emotional States in Real-Time -- http://hedonometer.org/index.html. Below is more details about the talk and Dr. Danforth's bio.
Abstract: Using human evaluation of the happiness of words, we analyze a diverse set of large-scale texts which reflect cultural experience including 50 years of music lyrics, 10,000 books, and 50 billion status updates from Twitter. We find that expressed happiness decreases through the day requiring a nightly reboot, happiness rises and falls with age and distance from the Earth's equator, and the atoms of language exhibit a surprisingly pro-social bias. Our tunable instrument ranks U.S. cities and states comparably with traditional survey based methods of quantifying well-being, and offers updates in real-time. This talk will describe these results in the context of our Computational Story Lab's ongoing efforts to understand the geographical and topological dynamics of large-scale socio-technical phenomena.
Bio: Chris Danforth is the Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences at UVM. He co-directs the Computational Story Lab, a group of applied mathematicians at the undergraduate, masters, phd, and postdoctoral level working on large-scale, system problems in many fields including sociology, nonlinear dynamics, networks, ecology, and physics. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Science Magazine, and the BBC among others. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort or his blog http://compstorylab.org