March 2020 – ACA Grant Received

CADS, in partnership with CIMS, has received a grant from the American Coatings Association to continue working on the development of a system that includes visualizations for past social media (specifically Twitter) activity and sentiment for various chemicals, while also forecasting future Virality of these same chemicals. The grant will prioritize the inclusion of Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics in the overall system being developed. Providing these capabilities to paint companies will allow them to prescribe marketing tactics and anticipate whether a specific chemical will have increased interest in the upcoming weeks. With this grant, Dr. Rand will collaborate with undergraduate students, Trevor Ferree and Aidan McCarthy, to apply revolutionary statistical processes to Twitter and Google Trends data in order to develop a novel approach to displaying and analyzing the social media data.