Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
MS Thesis Defense

Sentiment Analysis on Tweets and their
Relationship with Stock Market Trends

Jay Sharma

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Monday, July 29, 2013, ITE 325

We investigate whether sentiment derived from micro-blogging site Twitter can be used to identify important events (product launch, quarter results etc.) and help to infer the future movement of the stock. We used the volume and key performance index of Apple Company’s financial tweets to identify important events and infer the future movement. We present the results of machine learning algorithms (Naïve Bayes, Maximum Entropy, and SVM) for classifying the sentiment of Apple Company’s financial tweets. Statistical analysis using Granger causality test showed that we were able to infer the movement of Apple Company’s stock close price in advance.

Committee: Professors Yelena Yesha (chair), Shujia Zhou, and Tim Finin

It feels like every day you read about a new security breach on a website, in many cases involving weak passwords. It’s a known fact that users are notoriously lax when it comes to choosing their passwords, so there needs to be a better way of providing secure logins to your site. That’s where two-factor security comes in. It aims to complement your existing login scheme by also providing an alternative verification method (generally a cellphone) to validate that a user is, who they say they are. It’s a scheme in use by top sites such as Twitter and GMail and has proven to be very reliable in minimizing intrusions via weak passwords.

In this screencast, I’ll introduce you to a great service called Authy which provides a platform to build two-factor authentication right into your site.

UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller commented on the high profile that recent ex-presidents are assuming in public affairs and politics in an AP story that appeared on NPR this week,

In “Ex-Presidents Club: Lots of life after White House,” Schaller says that “the opportunities are greater” for ex-presidents who want to remain engaged after their time in office. He points to the globalization of politics and increased collaboration among current and former leaders, such as the Clinton-Bush partnerships to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia. For more detail, read “The Contemporary Presidency: Postpresidential Influence in the Postmodern Era,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33(1), which Schaller coauthored.

Schaller has also published a new column in The Baltimore Sun on President Obama’s recent comments about race in America following the George Zimmerman verdict. In the article Schaller writes, “[Obama] asked from us is a bit of introspection before we return to our regularly scheduled programming. Sadly, I suspect few Americans will oblige him, because empathy is more difficult to achieve than sympathy (which requires shared identities and experiences).”

Two days after starting work as the new director of INDS, Stephen Freeland traveled to Washington DC to present a public lecture on the emerging science surrounding the possibility of other life in the universe. This lecture was invited by the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which welcomed a diverse group of politicians, scientists and members of the general public to a Q&A about the implications of this work.

The research about which Dr. Freeland spoke falls under the emerging science of astrobiology (https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/about-astrobiology/) which, by placing together insights from the traditional scientific disciplines, is rapidly forming a consensus picture that life should not be as rare as was once thought. In fact the focal point of the lecture were "three clues consistent with extraterrestrial life."

A full description of this event, together with a video of the event, can be found here:

www.aaas.org/spp/dser/events/archives/lectures/2013/Exoplanets/Exoplanets6_19_2013.html