CyberEmotions (Collective Emotions in Cyberspace) is a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in FET ICT domain theme 3: ‘Science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT’. It started in February 2009 for a period of four years, and gathers approximately 40 scientists from Austria, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. Its main objective concerns understanding the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up eCommunities.
So far, research performed within the project has helped uncovering some of the mechanisms driving eCommunities, such as negative emotions. It has led to the creation of several sentiment analysis computer programs, such as SentiStrength. Additionally, data gathered from online communities –such as the BBC message boards– have been made available to any interested researcher.
Objectives The additional business partner, Gemius SA, is an online research agency dealing with Internet market research.
Centre of Excellence for Complex Systems Research, Warsaw University of Technology (Poland)
Virtual Reality Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton (United Kingdom)
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Austria)
Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
Department of Theoretical Physics, Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia)
Emotion, Cognition, Social Context, Jacobs University Bremen (Germany)
IKM Research Group, Berlin Institute of Technology (Germany)
Gemius SA (Poland)
Project Management Committee
Each institution is represented on the Project Management Committee by a work package leader:
# Prof. Dr. Janusz Holyst – Warsaw University of Technology, Poland (CyberEmotions Coordinator)
# Prof. Dr. Daniel Thalmann – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
# Prof. Dr. Michael Thelwall – University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
# Dr. Marcin Skowron – Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria
# Prof. Dr. Frank Schweitzer – ETH Zurich, Switzerland
# Prof. Dr. Bosiljka Tadic – Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
# Prof. Dr. Arvid Kappas – Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
# Dr. Matthias Trier, Asst. Prof. – University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands & TU Berlin, Germany
# Anna Borowiec – Gemius SA, Poland
Advisory Board
Three internationally renowned scientists form CyberEmotions' Advisory Board:
Prof. Dr. Roddy Cowie – Professor of Psychology at Queen's University, Northern Ireland
Prof. Dr. Jeff Johnson – Professor of Complexity Science and Design at The Open University, United Kingdom
Prof. Dr. Peter Richmond – Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Research
During the first two years of the project, CyberEmotions led to the discovery of underlying emotional processes in eCommunities. For instance, it was shown that important events (such as the
Oscars) typically generate a majority of
negatively valenced tweets, or that female users of
MySpace send and receive proportionately more positive comments than males. The project fostered the development of several sentiment mining software programmes capable of retrieving the
emotional valence and
arousal in text produced by web users. Several physics and network models were developed that help understand the dynamic behind variations in valence and arousal of messages posted in eCommunities. Finally, software was designed that is able to respond in an emotionally-consistent way to messages produced by users varying in emotional content.
See also
Affective computing
Cyberspace
Emotion
Group emotion
Sentiment analysis
References
External links
CyberEmotions official website
CyberEmotions project description, on the European Commission website
SentiStrength, sentiment mining software developed under the CyberEmotions framework.
Commetrix, dynamic network visualization and analysis software applied for visualizing sentiment dissemination in networks for the CyberEmotions framework.
Category:Seventh Framework Programme projects
Category:European Commission projects
Category:Science and technology in Europe
Category:European Union and science and technology
