Two teams of GSLIS students have been selected to present at the social media expo during the 2014 iConference on “Leveraging Social Media to Foster Smarter Societies.” An overall winning team will be selected from the student team presentations at the conference in March.

The two student teams are:

SentiNets, advised by Dr. Jana Diesner, comprised of Jinlong Guo (Ph.D.), Kirstin Phelps (Ph.D.), Shubhanshu Mishra (Ph.D.), Johna Picoo (M.S.), and Sneha Agarwal (M.S.), provides a computational approach to sentiment on Twitter by creating a new classifier that measures tweets along their degree of enthusiasm and level of support towards a social cause. Combined with influence, a more nuanced understanding of tweet sentiment around social causes can help better identify influential users for social advocacy and collective action.

Local Vocal, advised by Dr. Jon Gant, comprised of Kinyetta Nance (Ph.D.), William Langston (M.S.), and Chris Nixon (M.S.), is “The Kickstarter of Social Entrepreneurship” where design thinking meets social media and creates civic engagement and social entrepreneurship. Local Vocal is a web app that uses design thinking, human centered innovation and social media to provide a platform for local community members to take their civic engagement projects from ideation to creation. Click here to watch a video on the Local Vocal project.