A team of Information Systems students from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) have won the ‘Most Promising Research’ honour at the fifth annual Undergraduate Conference in Information Systems (UCIS) held in Pittsburgh, US, for their submission ‘Using predictive sentiment analysis to gain actionable insights into the public opinion of the 2022 FIFA World Cup’.
The winning team comprised Syed Hassan Mehdi, Maher Khan, Ibrahim Soltan, and Jiyda Mohamed Moussa. “Sentiment analysis entails understanding public opinion, and in our case we analysed over 2,000 tweets from Qatar, the US and the UK categorising them depending on the sentiment conveyed,” said Soltan, a sophomore at CMU-Q.
“Predictive analysis uses historical data and past trends that help speculate what will happen in the future. So combining both would improve the organising committee’s ability to understand public opinion in order to enhance the overall spectator experience of the games.”
The students’idea for the project was conceived following a class that required them to determine how businesses use “big data”- and the intelligence it provides-to their advantage.
The UCIS conference was sponsored by the Information Systems programme at CMU-Q and the Qatar Association of Information Systems chapter. Students were encouraged to include in their submissions key components within the field of information systems, a discipline that brings together people, processes and technology to help organisations use information to make decisions.