Information systems students from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar recently won ‘Most Promising Research’ at the fifth annual Undergraduate Conference in Information Systems (UCIS) held in Pittsburgh, USA, for their submission ‘Using predictive sentiment analysis to gain actionable insights into the public opinion of the 2022 FIFA World Cup’.

The winning team comprised information systems students Syed Hassan Mehdi, Maher Khan, Ibrahim Soltan, and Jiyda Mohamed Moussa. Several team members have also submitted their project to the recently launched ‘Challenge 22’ innovation award, which was introduced to Carnegie Mellon students during a lecture by Hassan Al Thawadi, secretary general of the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series.

“Sentiment analysis entails understanding public opinion, and in our case we analyzed over 2,000 Tweets from Qatar, the US and the UK categorizing them depending on the sentiment conveyed,” said Soltan, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon Qatar.

“Predictive analysis uses historical data and past trends that help speculate what will happen in the future. So combining both would improve the organizing committee’s ability to understand public opinion in order to enhance the overall spectator experience of the games.”

The students’ idea for the project was conceived following a class that required them to determine how businesses use ‘big data’—and the intelligence it provides—to their advantage.

The UCIS conference was sponsored by the Information Systems program at Carnegie Mellon Qatar and the Qatar Association of Information Systems chapter in Qatar. Students were encouraged to include in their submissions key components within the field of information systems, a discipline that brings together people, processes and technology to help organizations use information to make decisions.

This year’s conference was co-chaired by Selma Limam-Mansar, associate dean, education, at Carnegie Mellon Qatar; Divakaran Liginlal, associate teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon Qatar and advisor to the winning project; and Jeria Quesenberry, associate teaching professor of information systems in Carnegie Mellon’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences in Pittsburgh.

“We were delighted with the quality of the student research at UCIS, which asked for submissions in-line with this year’s theme, ‘Opportunities and New Horizons with Information Communication Technologies. The CMU-Q students who were awarded ‘Most Promising Research’ exemplify how organizations can use data and technology strategically to improve customer experiences,” Limam-Mansar said.

For more information about the information systems program at Carnegie Mellon Qatar, please visit: www.qatar.cmu.edu/is

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