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Student Highlight – Brandon Joyce

Brandon Joyce, a student in UNCG’s Accelerated Computer Science BS+MS program, will be presenting his research entitled “Sentiment Analysis of Tweets for the 2016 US Presidential Election” (research performed with Dr. Deng) at the 2017 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference, being held November 3-5 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this research, Mr. Joyce and Dr. Deng used lexicon and machine learning techniques to calculate the sentiment of over 7 million tweets referring to either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump between July 31 and November 7, and found a strong correlation with political polls taken during that same timeframe. Their findings suggest that Twitter analysis is able to rival sophisticated polling techniques, and their work expands the knowledge base regarding mining social media.