Recently Team Curious created a really interesting website, MDGActors that uses a mix of APIs to recognize actors for the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). This is how they describe it:
“Tackling the toughest problems facing the world today is a big job. What if we could highlight the people that are making a big difference and call out the people that aren’t? We think that it would be inspiring—Umair Haque thinks it could change the world.” Read their complete manifesto
They scan relevant articles for personal names, and classifies sentences around it with the Mood classifier (created by Mattias). They call it ‘Empathize’ and describe it as:
“If an author voices particularly strong sentiment in a sentence, an icon is added next to the sentence to indicate that feeling. Phrases with hearts are usually about people doing good, and phrases with condescending frowns usually signal more controversial topics.”
I find the idea very interesting, being able to pinpoint heroes and anti-heroes for a good cause. Great work!
Another interesting application Team Curious are providing is their Spin, where you just enter any keyword and it will tell you the sentiment of the results.
Entering George Bush came back with 14 negative and 0 positive voices.
Entering ‘Terminator Salvation‘ showed 2 negative and 11 positive voices.
Their project is a part of the Microsofts Imagine Cup Competition, I really wish you guys the best of luck!!