Question: Team Members Full Names:
Answer: Marc-Antoine Paré, Kathy Pham

Question: Mentor:
Answer: Keith Edwards

Question: Title of Project:
Answer: Millennium Development Goal Actors

Question: Project Overview:
Answer: Our entry to Imagine Cup 2009 revolves around the application of sentiment analysis algorithms to content published on the Internet. We realized that sentiment analysis tools had the potential to make data more meaningful to people. That is, if we could place otherwise flat text into the context of human emotion, we could make stories richer to the users interacting with them. This had the potential to address the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) because it could be used to inspire action by connecting users to the stories of people effecting change in the world. We built a Popfly block to enable others developers to leverage this value as well as three unique mashups to demonstrate the Block’s potential. Finally, we built a website that links these three mashups, ultimately creating a cohesive experience dedicated to addressing the Millennium Development Goals. Our mashups use a number of sophisticated natural language processing APIs to filter and enrich online content into a more inspirational form. The source of content for analysis is different for each of our three mashups—ranging from Google News searches to Twitter updates. Of course, all three enrich this data using our sentiment analysis Popfly Block. Each of our three mashups—MDG Actors, How Does Twitter Feel?, and Show Me Spin—has its own unique form for presenting this enriched data. The ultimate goal is provide content that connects better with users since it takes into account human emotion. The most innovative aspect of the project is using sentiment analysis to forge a more intimate connection with between users and data.

Question: Technology/Software Used:
Answer: uclassify, Open Calais, Daylife, LingPipe, AlchemyAPI, Google News, change.org RSS, Twitter API, Java Servlets, PHP, HTML/CSS, Java

Question: Inspiration: What inspired your team to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup and why did you choose the MashUp competition?
Answer: We were inspired by the ability to apply knowledge we have learned throughout college to make an impact on the world. We saw the opportunity to apply our passions to a directed purpose. The MashUp competition allowed us to creatively engage available web tools to develop something meaningful, useful and inspirational. We both had some experience with web development (thought not mashups), and saw the MashUp competition as a place we could find a niche and build something impacting.

Question: Team History: How did your team meet?
Answer: We are both American students who coincidentally studied at Georgia Tech's Lorraine campus in Metz, France during Fall 2008. We both became actively involved in Georgia Tech Lorraine's BDE (Bureau des Eleves = French Student Government) and became friends while planning events for students and immersing ourselves in the French culture. During a random evening in the computer lab, we both discovered our passions for challenges, technology, web development and using technology for positive change. Knowing Marc's creative background with web design, Kathy mentioned the Imagine Cup. Thus began a journey of brainstorming, feature specification, learning, fun times and the unleashing of passions for technology and changing the world.

Question: Team Experience: What experience did your team have with MashUp before competing in the Imagine Cup?
Answer: We both had some experience with web development, but no experience with mashups or Popfly.

Question: Highlights: What has been the best part of the Imagine Cup competition to date?
Answer: Learning about the Millennium Development Goals, learning about new tools and application, discovering interesting ways to combine unrelated tools to produce something inspiring and enriching, mastering challenges with mashups through creative code, seeing people all over the world unite under the same purpose of using technology to help the MDGs progress. There is a huge community of people online--bloggers, programmers, students--committed to using technology for good. It was inspiring to contribute to this community with our work for Imagine Cup.

Question: Inspiration: How did your team come up with your submission? Include which Millennium Development Goal inspired your solution.
Answer: After quite a few 10am Thursday morning meetings at Georgia Tech Lorraine to brainstorm and pick each other's brains, we decided to put our ideas into a list of tangible projects during the 2 week winter reak. Since we were no longer in the same location, we spent a couple of hours on Skype and came up with a list of 50 ideas. They ranged from highlighting micro-financing opportunities to geo-based mashups that allow volunteers to dynamically find opportunities. We always found ourselves revisiting the idea of bringing opportunities and ideas to people. We watched more Ted Talks, became more inspired and slowly developed this idea of bringing stories to people. If people are aware of inspirational service acts by others, then they may be inspired to act as well. One day, Marc excitedly proposed the idea of showing the world the heroes who are acting on the Millennium Development Goals. This idea was inspired by how Ted Talks bring together inspirational ideas that motivate others to also want to make a difference. We wanted to do the same with news and everyday people. This initial idea developed into what is now MDG Actors- a tool where people and stories related to the MDGs are highlighted with ratings on positive and negative sentiments towards them. In order to show the versatility of our Popfly block which analyzes sentiments on a piece of text, we also present a "How does Twitter feel... " tool and a "Show me Spin..." tool. These tools further show how the world feels about a topic by analyzing Twitter Tweets. They also showcase the news stories related to specific MDG actors and indicate the positive or negative sentiments that those news stories express. The two latter tools not only allow users to find sentiments around people and events of the Millennium Development Goals, but are also fun for exploring sentiments about random topics and events. The inspiration for our submissions was all of the MDGs. We wanted to bring the latest stories, news and ideas related to the MDGs to all people to inspire change.

Question: Challenges: What personal or technological challenges did your team face while developing your submission?
Answer: Technical Challenges: UI challenges with Popfly, deployment and adoption in short time frame. Javascript was the most time consuming part of development. We really pushed the boundaries of what was possible with Popfly, making our development process a bit more difficult. Personal Challenges: balancing classwork with Imagine Cup (since Imagine Cup was the more enticing of the two), narrowing broad down ideas to something tangible and impacting (at one point we had a list of 50 ideas!).

Question: Future Plans: What does your team plan on doing after the Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt? Do you plan to use your project to launch a new business?
Answer: Our mashup is just the first step in highlighting the world’s heroes. While working on it, we became aware that we were building a platform for future content analysis. We would love to see it grow past what is shown at Imagine Cup. We would also like to use our site as a portal for donors, sponsors and volunteers to donate to causes related to the MDGs. Throughout this process, we have seen how Social Media can have a great positive impact on the world and are excited to explore how our tools and research can contribute to this impact.

Question: Links to more information (i.e. website, blog):
Answer: MAIN PAGE: http://teamcurious.com/ MASHUPS: http://teamcurious.com/actors/, http://www.teamcurious.com/actors/twitter.php, http://www.teamcurious.com/actors/spin.php BLOG: http://blog.teamcurious.com/