Twitter Mood Researchers Bollen and Mao Join Social Scientists at Inaugural Socionomics Summit

GAINESVILLE, Ga., March 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Johan Bollen and Huina Mao of "Twitter predicts the stock market" fame will address the 2011 Socionomics Summit on April 16 in Atlanta. The Indiana University academics will discuss their research on public mood sentiment data on Twitter, wherein they discovered that changes in social mood recorded on Twitter correlate with major trends in the Dow Jones Industrial Average days later.

Bollen and Mao's groundbreaking work in computational social science is under negotiation to be tested in real time in a $40M hedge fund operated by Derwent Capital Markets. Their research shows that Twitter mood data predicts the stock market with 87.6 percent accuracy. Both researchers spoke with EWI's Jill Noble about their experiment; listen to the audio here.

Dr. Eric Gilbert of Georgia Tech will also speak at the Summit. Gilbert tracked mood data from more than 20 million blog posts on the blogging site LiveJournal. His research found that increases in expressions of anxiety, worry and fear predicted downward pressure on the S&P 500 index. At the Summit, Gilbert will discuss how social media can predict outcomes that range from relationship strength to stock prices.

Hedge fund manager Scott Reamer, another Summit presenter, uses collective social mood as an investment philosophy to unify economics, physics and sociology. He will discuss his views on how collective behavior governs asset prices.

Other speakers at the event include best-selling Mood Matters author John Casti; Minyanville sage Kevin Depew; the Institute's Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Matt Lampert; plus four other speakers who will present their latest research. The Socionomics Institute's founder and president, Robert R. Prechter, Jr., will open and close the summit.  

Members of the media are welcome to attend. Please contact Alexandra Lienhard, [email protected] or visit: http://www.socionomics.net/info/SocSummitMedia for credential information.

About Socionomics

Socionomics is the study of how society's changes in mood motivate social actions in many realms, including the economy, political preferences, financial markets, actions of peace and war, and the fads and fashions of popular culture. Robert Prechter began formulating socionomic theory in 1976. He introduced the idea to the public in an article in Barron's in 1985 and wrote his first book on the subject - The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior - in 1999. He has since made presentations on socionomic causality to The University of Cambridge, Georgia Tech, The London School of Economics, MIT, Oxford University, SUNY, Trinity College Dublin, and academic conferences.

The Socionomics Institute, based in Gainesville, Ga., studies social mood and its role in driving cultural, economic and political trends. The Institute's analysis is published in the monthly research review, The Socionomist. Work by the Socionomics Institute and other socionomists has been covered by The Atlantic, Barron's, Esquire Magazine, The Futurist Magazine, MarketWatch, Mother Jones, Nature, New Scientist, Science, USA Today and others. Learn more at http://www.socionomics.net.

SOURCE The Socionomics Institute