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USC Project Uses Tweets To Predict Oscars

Can you use Twitter to predict who is going to win the Academy Awards? That's the idea behind a project being run by the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab. IBM, and the Los Angeles Times. According to the groups, they are working on an analysis of millions of public tweets to attempt to pick the Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories of the 84th Academy Awards. The effort is applying language analysis and language software from IBM to try to distinguish positive and negative tweets about films, actors, and actresses, to predict the possible winners of an Oscar. The effort is being run by Professor Jonathan Taplin at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, who local entrepreneurs and investors might know as the founder of Intertainer; he also had served in the investment banking industry at Merrill Lynch and a producer in Hollywood for Martin Scorsese. The group said they'll be showing a real time analysis of the winners with the LA Times.