Automation and Evaluation of Business Intelligence

Analytic-OR is interested in automating the task of collecting and compiling information about plannedactivities (e.g. conferences, professional events, workshops) of interest to specific professional groups (e.g.health professionals) from a long and changing list of web sites containing information, in a wide variety offormats. This is an information extraction problem: algorithms and software are needed that will automaticallyscan the list looking for events of interest to the client professional group, and, once such an event is identified,to extract its title, dates, location, the address of the event web site, and other useful information, and compile itin a form that is easily accessible to the client. Due to the large variety of formats and the large number of websites, a solution that avoids the custom implementation of a different script for each web site is required. Anadditional problem is that often the address of the event web site is wrong, and additional manual work isneeded to find it.Once an event of interest is extracted, it is useful for the client organizations to track the buzz and monitoractivity around it in social media (such as Twitter and Facebook), including monitoring of active influencers,and summarize the findings in an easy to digest format, as they evolve over time. The proposed project aims tomake significant progress on these challenging problems, and transfer the technology to Analytic-OR for theirnext generation business intelligence web service.