The Dartmouth Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics would like to invite you to our very first meeting.
Time: Monday, April 9th at 6:00 PM
Location: Kemeny 006
Speaker: Chris Danforth (Applied Mathematician at the University of Vermont)
Seminar Topic: "Measuring Happiness: Social Media as a Laboratory"
Food will be served.
Still curious?
Abstract: Using human evaluation of the happiness of words, we analyze a diverse set of large-scale texts which reflect human experience including millions of weblogs and billions of status updates from Twitter. We find that happiness rises and falls with age
and distance from the Earth's equator; the 2008 Presidential Election was the happiest day in the blogosphere in the last 5 years; and the written form of the English language exhibits a pro-social bias. In this talk, we discuss these findings in the context
of our ongoing effort to develop a remote sensor of population level well-being: the 'Hedonometer'.
Biography: Chris Danforth received a B.S. in math and physics from Bates College in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland in 2006. He is currently
on the faculty of the University of Vermont where he combines mathematical modeling and big-data to study a variety of complex biological, natural, and physical systems. Among other projects, he has applied principles of chaos theory to improve weather forecasts,
and developed a real-time remote sensor of global happiness using Twitter. 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