Alex Isken (Marquette University student and AIM Class of
2015) received the Best Presentation Award for his research on the topic of “Beating
the Stock Market: Measuring the Predictive Power of Twitter Sentiment Analysis.”
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| Alex Isken |
We are proud to announce that on February 27, 2016, Alex Isken
won the Best Presentation award at
the 2016 Undergraduate Conference in
Information Systems (UCIS) at Carnegie-Mellon. This is an outstanding accomplishment and we
offer this special note offering congratulations to Alex. The UCIS is a prestigious conference and this an outstanding honor for Alex.
In a previous
blog entry we highlighted about Alex’s contributions in hosting a ‘big data
and fundamental analysis” workshop to the AIM students in February. His
knowledge of how to mine data from micro-blogs was shared with other students
and has led to a special exercise being added to the AIM curriculum.
While their research will only scratch the surface of using
real-time data, they will learn the basics of coding (using Python), wrangling
and arraying data (using Google Refine) and conduct a sentiment analysis (using
R statistical software). This assignment will add another potential fundamental
analysis tool to their set of skills.
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| Dr. Ow, Alex Isken, and Dr. Krause |
Alex said, “The Carnegie Mellon students had some pretty
incredible research, especially considering their technical programming skills.
No other groups touched on any financial or investment related topic though. I
had a lot of students and faculty approach me throughout the day to ask more about
the research… in fact, one of the Carnegie Mellon professors teaching abroad in
Qatar was especially interested in the process. It was a great experience, and
I got many comments about “why haven’t I thought of trying that myself?”
Dr. David Krause, AIM program director, believes that the use
of big data is the next level in the evolution of fundamental analysis and that
graduates of the AIM program should be comfortable using this method of
analysis.
He stated, "We appreciate Dr. Ow and Alex Isken helping the AIM
students understand the process of evaluating big data. We believe that this
type of data analytics will continue to growth in importance across many
disciplines. It is with workshops (like the one administered by Dr. Ow and
Alex) that our students are able to continue to refine their research and
analysis expertise. Does Twitter and other micro-blog sentiment trends serve as
a predictor of a company’s future relative stock price? Well, Alex’s research
certainly impressed the experts at Carnegie Mellon so we’ll have to wait and
see!"
