Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) Revisited - The Case of BPU Holdings

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on Artificial Emotional Intelligence, a kind of A.I. that emulates the EQ aspects of our mental process. Of course this technology is still limited to emulating basic aspects of the human emotional spectrum, focusing mainly on comprehending emotion through text data. Nevertheless, this can still add a lot of value to an organization, as in the case of ZimGo Polling, an initiative to predict the outcome of an election, prior to the counting of the votes. 

BPU Holdings, the company behind this ambitious yet quite down-to-earth initiative, make use of an advanced NLP system, employing some specialized AI systems (interestingly I’m currently in the process of creating a video on the topic of NLP, for Safari!). Also, the data for this endeavor stems from social media, something that ensures abundance as well as freshness, both key factors in making good predictions on this sort of trends. 

Since part of my job at DSP Ltd. is being up-to-date on the latest and greatest trends in data science and A.I., when a representative of BPU Holdings approached me with their AEI ideas, I took the opportunity to learn more about this field and about what they were doing. That’s how that previous blog post I mentioned came about. Last month, I had the opportunity to talk to the people of this company directly, learning more about their work and AEI’s promise of bringing more value to organizations around the world, through this intriguing niche. After looking into this matter a bit, I became convinced that this company may be actually on to something. 

The case study presented to me involved the S. Korean elections, where this AEI system managed to predict the results with impressive accuracy. Of course, the company doesn’t plan to rest at its laurels, as there are already plans to apply this new approach to data analytics to other areas, such as the US elections. You can read more about this as well as the company’s offerings in the attached press release as well as its website. 

Note that I am not affiliated with this company, so if I appear a bit biased towards it that’s because I favor the use of A.I. for such initiatives, rather than other, more aggressive applications, such as those in the military. After all, if there is one thing that I hope has come across from all my postings on this topic, it is that A.I. can be a positive tech, bringing about value to everyone, not just some multinational conglomerates that may not always use it wisely. Also, instead of following blindly this or the other A.I. expert on the social media, I prefer to take a more active approach to this matter by directly connecting with the people involved and providing them with feedback on this tech, as they are developing it. That’s why this blog is the first one worldwide to publicly announce this company’s initiative and bring AEI to the conversation table. 

What are your thoughts / emotions on it? Feel free to share them with me, either through this blog or via a direct message.

press_release_zimgo_polling_final2.pdf
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