Predicting the Oscars with uberVU 2 comments

On the 27th of February 2011 the 83rd Academy Awards took place. As with all the previous years there have been innumerable speculations of who will win, experts predicting, search engines like Yahoo and Google pounding their chest that their indexes can predict the winners, all kind of polls, from Webtrends to Yahoo. Some use the chatter on Twitter and other social networks, some their indexes and most failed miserably.

Google, who claimed that in the previous 3 years the buzz around the movies, as recorded by Google Trends, were a good indicator of the winner. They even made a special website, not available anymore, where you could compare the most likely winners. If you looked at the graphic below, the King’s Speech is dead last, with Black Swan marching towards victory.

 

So Google was wrong, Yahoo was wrong, pre-Oscar chatter was wrong, but is there something measurable that could predict the winners? Well, it turns out there is something,

Before going on a small warning is needed. Everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The jury that decides who gets what award is made out of humans with subjective opinions and with different qualification than that of the masses that generate all this data. So it’s normal, in a way, that what is popular is not viewed as the most award-worthy. If you go back and look at stats you will see that The Clash of the Titans, not a masterpiece for the ages, had more buzz than some of the excellent movies that were nominated. So take everything with a grain of salt and make your own judgments.

With the help of the tools the uverVU provides I was able to get sentiment data for 6 of the movies I thought were most likely to win. I also gathered the number of mentions. The aim was to see if the sentiments about a movie are able to predict which one will win. The categories I aimed at were Best Picture, Best Actor in Leading Role and Best Actress in Leading role. Because the same movies, more or less, were nominated for Best Sound or Best Costume, and I had no way to differentiate between the criteria, only these 3 categories were picked.

For these movies I calculated a simple index, that basically normalized  the data in a range between 0 an 100 and the bigger the index the more positive the chatter was. The results are the following

The table gives the sentiment index for these dates and the last column is the average, without the 27th, when everything sky-rocketed for some of the movies. So this data, which you can get and calculate, predicted the winner, granted with the smallest of margins on The Social Network and True Grit, but it still did.

For best Actor the story is the same. The data is fro the period 14-26th February.

And  for Bes Actress… not so much, Natalie Portman being the last. Arguably because of her weird role, but still, the data did not prevail.

But still, with a little magic from uberVU and some sentiment analysis you had better chances to pick the winner by using this techniques than with going with the Google approach.

To Google’s defense, if you followed the actual number of mentioned on uberVU you would of gotten a similar result as with their Google Trends, no matter how you plotted those trend lines. It just wasn’t the year of mentions.

Hope you found the article interesting, if you have any questions drop me a line, and before I end I’ll write the story of how I came to do my little study.

A huge thanks to uberVU for giving me an account to play with the data for a project I’m working on!

So how come I ended up using uberVU for this and what’s the back story. In an attempt to figure out if there is any connection between the data that you can pick up from social networks and actual economic results I went back to a research that stirred up some attention a few months earlier. In a paper called “Twitter mood predicts the stock market”, Johan Bollen and his colleagues used sentiment analysis and Twitter data to improve existing algorithms for predicting the stock-market. In Bollen’s own words “We were pretty astonished that this actually worked … Including this mood information leads to higher accuracy”.

By using the same logic I thought to gather information about a field that is narrow enough to be easily filtered and popular enough to generate a ton of messages, so movies were chosen. I went and built my own little app that gathered messages from Twitter about 30 movies, and made use of a service called Tweet Sentiments to figure out if the tweets were positive, negative and neutral. By running the app for 2 months and gathering and analyzing I ended up with more than 850.000 messages that were classified based on their sentiments. Using a simple formula I computed the “Sentiments Index”, which shows on a value from 0 to 100 if the tweet is positive or negative, 100 being completely positive and 0 completely negative.

With this I went to IMDb and got all the ratings for these 30 movies, as I figured that they are a good indicator of how well received the movies are and then crawled various sites to find the box-office earnings. Armed with this, it was time for some simple correlations and surprise-surprise, there is a correlation between the sentiments and the ratings or box-office. The number of movies is small enough not to be extremely accurate, sentiment analysis is not very accurate and messages from Twitter are not always very meaningful, so the data could be better, but it was a start,

My own application gathered data that was somewhat inaccurate so I went and used uberVU, a company I greatly admire and gathered the same data, as they give a very nice breakdown of overall sentiment in positive, negative and neutral.

There data turned out to be more accurate than my little app could gather and I bet that my hosting provider was happy I stopped harassing the servers.

So now I had an idea that sentiments about movies have a connection to the ratings and the box office, a way to get it and the Oscars were coming up. So, why not gather data about those movies and see if the winners come on top. As you saw, my results were more accurate that the more elaborate attempts.

Another sort of stop-motion Comments Off

I love stop motion, I’ve wrote about great stop-motion or time-manipulation examples here and here. And here comes another great example of a sort of stop motion done with Google Docs for Google Demo Slam about which I’ve written a little here.

It amazes me the pains some people would go to make these things and while thinking about it, it downed on me that the more time-consuming the clips are the greater we think the outcome is. Or at least this is how it works for me. I find myself thinking: those poor soles spend a week putting post-its on a wall to give me 5 minutes of enjoyment, wooooow. So enjoy the 3 day work these guys made, which totaled in 450 slides.

Spam on Google Street View Comments Off

Bucharest just got it’s Google Street View, and it tool just a few hours for some guy to figure out how to spam the system.
One of the places people would go first is Piata Unirii. It’s in the middle of the city, it’s well known and easy to find. And right in front of the big Unirii store there is a truck. What does it say on the car? Hotel Padova Inn. Yeah right…

And the hotel itself is not even around the corner, is some 3 km away.

I couldn’t yet find a way to report this to the Google guys, but this is Spam to me, in all it’s glory!

Language barriers? Comments Off

Google had a campaign called Google Demo Slam where anybody could submit a creative video about one of Googles product and get the chance to show of in front of many people. Some of the ideas presented were so so, some were better but some, in my opinion, are brilliant.

Check out what these 2 below thought of to show Google Translate. I think it’s a very successful showcase of the potential of Google Translate.

As a bonus, check out what these bunch did by playing around with perspective. Although the ingenuity is brilliant I still like the translation thing more for the glimpse in the future possibilities of the technology it gives. Science fiction, watch your back!

Google TV? Do we really need it? Comments Off

My first thought when I heard about Google TV yesterday was – are they for real? But then I kept watching and I saw, together with the rest of thousands of people watching the Google I/O conference that these guys were serious about it. When Eric Schmidt lined up 6-7 CEO’s from big companies on stage it became very apparent how much they are pushing this.

So we know Google is serious and it seems like a cool product and everything and you might ask why was I so surprised when I heard about it. It’s simple, the thing ain’t new and it’s not solving anything unsolvable.

For some time now I’ve been planning to buy me a NAS with a media server on it, hook it up to the TV, hook my PS3 to the TV and take a cable from the router and put it in my PS3 so I can stream movies directly from the laptop without any problems. Oh, yeah, and figure out and easy way to output my laptop screen to the TV (not that hard at all, as most laptops come with and HDMI output, these days).

What that would give is not very far from what Google wants with the G TV thingy. I already have tons of hardware lying around, do I really need a TV that is essentially a specialized computer?

But while walking home, after watching the Google I/O conference at Bucharest Hubb (than’s Petrica for setting things up), I thought to listen to an audiobook, so out comes my iPod and with it a revelation. It’s not about me! It’s not about the geeks who know what a NAS is and how to set up a media server and who have a box of wires under their bed (I do) to connect everything up. It’s about the rest of the world, consisting of people who barely know how to use their remote. TV is a 4 Billion users industry! There are a lot of people who want to do it easier.

And the Google approach makes it easy to have web + apps + video + tv all in one, like the iPod made possible to have ’1000 songs in your pocket’ hassle free. Same goes here. Watch out Apple, Google is after your ass. But they don’t need me to tell them that. Plus Apple already made an attempt with Apple TV.

After this revelation everything seems to have more chances of success, but I’m still skeptical. In 1.5 years we’ll know if the G TV thing will fly or fall. What’s your take on it?

Google is loosing the mojo – too evil, are we? Comments Off

I don’t know what Google is up to lately, probably survival, but it’s mojo is going away, fast. At least for me it is.”Don’t be evil” – my ass. Nobody even questions that they are a gigantic corporation, a monopole is search and online advertising, but until not so long ago they were trying to put on this cool “I’m just a giant start-up” show. OK�people, game over, nobody believes this anymore.

So why is Google evil? Well, let’s stat with the latest thing. They’re trying to get this incredibly hard to replicate preferential agreement with various network providers. Basically they want their content to go faster in the web. Web Neutrality begone. See here for more details. They say “Anybody can do the same”. Let’s get real Anybody = Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?

Their the new big monopoly, the new Microsoft. Remember when Google backed down on the Google-Yahoo deal? Check here for more info. The main idea was that they backed down because they were afraid no to go down the Microsoft road with this.

For me, as a developer, there are few things about Google more iconic then the famous 20% time for personal projects thing. Maybe even more famous then their cook… maybe not, but anyway. It is so exciting to�

hear how every programmer can have this wacky idea and maybe one day see it become THE thing. Maybe�they still give the 20% but they are now focusing at a big level only on the really promising projects, the ones that can bring some… value. This is part of their financial crisis plan (more here – article in Romanian). Wait a minute, this ain’t startupy anymore.�

By the way, is Google in a hiring freeze or a firing meltdown (I want to get all the credit for the bad word play, thank you)? Nobody seems to know. Officially no, in off the record, probably.

So google is not David anymore it grew into Goliath. It’s normal for Google to do what any big company has to do to survive – walk on the bodies of their�competitors but the�change�is a little bit too sudden. Maybe the so much talked about crisis is contributing to this, who knows.

But I must give them this – they’re aplications rock, and as long as this is so I don’t care who they act as.

LE: Google tries to answer the Net Neutrality issue on it’s blog – see here.

Gmail + :) = Gmail si Emoticons Comments Off

Gmail are acum si Emoticons. Uite un print screen din contul meu ;)