Teaching Tip: A Social Media Analytics Capstone Research Project with Community Engagement

Businesses assess public sentiment toward relevant topics and gain valuable insights through social media analytics (SMA). Students of business information analytics can therefore reap multiple benefits from SMA as a learning tool. We designed and implemented an SMA capstone project that integrated undergraduate research and community engagement. Students first identified research questions on their topics of interest that aligned with the interests of the client, a community organization. They collected relevant tweets through Twitter’s API using R and then assessed public sentiment through text mining and analytics tools such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. They also presented their findings to various stakeholders through multiple venues. Preliminary assessment suggests that the students achieved positive learning outcomes

Weather and climate information needs of small-scale farming and fishing communities in western Kenya for enhanced adaptive potential to climate change

Hydro-climatic variability owing to climate change is a major driver of vulnerability among subsistence rural farmers in Kenya. Vulnerability is exacerbated by a lack of reliable weather and climate information necessary to support adaptation to more resilient farming practices. In the form that it is currently delivered, weather and climate information does not support the operational decisions that farmers and fishers make such as timing of land preparation, planting time, type of seed or likelihood of severe weather. This paper presents the results of an approach for eliciting perspectives from farmers and fishers on the weather and climate information products they need to support operational decisions. The specific objectives of the study were to: quantify the capacity of the agricultural and fishing communities to use existing weather and climate information; evaluate the service improvements delivered to farmers and; develop and test community education and awareness tools designed to help farmers and fishers make better decisions that reduce risks to their lives and livelihoods. The study was conducted in Rarieda constituency between August 2011 and December 2011. 401 farmers and 34 fishers were interviewed coupled with interactive focus group discussions with expert farmers and fishers. Results show that approximately 92% of farmers receive weather and climate information, mainly through radios and local administration, yet only 14% find the information useful in their operational decisions. Conversely, fishermen reported that there was no weather and climate information directly targeting them. Long term forecasts significantly influenced nearly all operation decisions which accounted for about 35.9% of the total variability in land preparation, 34.3% choice of seeds, 2.6% planting time and 36.1% in disaster management whereas daily forecasts had no statistical significance (p \u3e 0.05) on any of the operations. 89% of the respondents were willing to pay for weather and climate information services though this was highly correlated with the wealth of an individual (X2 (4, N = 401) = 23.521, p \u3c0.001). The study concludes that the weather information currently received by farmers is inadequate and service improvements need to be enhanced for optimal use of the available weather forecast for informed livelihood operational decisions

The relationship between the use of artificial intelligence and the customer experience in the power industry

The literature on customer experience and artificial intelligence is extensive, but there is a gap in the power industry regarding these issues. This thesis aims to assess if there is a connection between artificial intelligence usage and the customer experience in the industry. An index that indicates several technologies 'existence or absence in each of the forty companies examined was developed. There we reno significant effects of AIan dCX on the power industry, but the null hypothesis is not accepted since it was not proved that there is no relationship. It might exist, but the current study missed it

The ARCANE Project: how an ecological dynamics framework can enhance performance assessment and prediction in football

This paper discusses how an ecological dynamics framework can be implemented to interpret data, design practice tasks and interpret athletic performance in collective sports, exemplified here by research ideas within the Augmented peRCeption ANalysis framEwork for Football (ARCANE) project promoting an augmented perception of football teams for scientists and practitioners. An ecological dynamics rationale can provide an interpretation of athletes’ positional and physiological data during performance, using new methods to assess athletes’ behaviours in real-time and, to some extent, predict health and performance outcomes. The proposed approach signals practical applications for coaches, sports analysts, exercise physiologists and practitioners through merging a large volume of data into a smaller set of variables, resulting in a deeper analysis than typical measures of performance outcomes of competitive games