Happy Olympic tweeters to light up London Eye A group of American graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a British professor, Mike Thelwall, from the University of the Wolverhampton, who is an expert in social media linguistic analysis, have been tracking all UK-based Olympic-related tweets for the last couple of months - and made the startling discovery: we are excited about the games. Between 20,000 and 60,000 such tweets have been posted a day since the beginning of the Olympic torch relay in May, and more than 100,000 are expected every day of the Games. Thelwall and the graduates, who run an art and technology company called Sosolimited, have been commissioned to develop an intuitive algorithm to track the sentiment of British tweeters about the Olympics by EDF Energy, the official electricity supplier to London 2012, in order to create the "world's first social media driven light show," called "Energy of the Nation" on the London Eye (which EDF sponsor). The algorithm splits the tweets into positive and negative conversations and filters them through a programme, which systematically converts them into a lightshow. The algorithm we developed converts real-time social emotions into colour and motion and then tweets to the light show. We distil 24 hours of action into a 24 minute visual concert that embodies the emotional peaks and troughs of the day," explains Justin Manor, the founder of Sosolimited. Thelwall was brought in to develop a specific Olympic-related dictionary of 2,750 terms and so the project could make use of his sentiment system, Sentistrength, which can determine the positivity and negativity of all tweets. Each word is assigned a positive or negative score. Sentistrength, which has been in development since 2009 as part of a European Union-funded project called Cyber Emotions, also monitors slang words and regional terms from across the UK. Phrases such as "totes amazeballs" [denoting totally amazing] in conjunction with the Olympics is proving popular at the moment and so has been added to Thelwall's growing dictionary. Sentistrength can also detect new works which are not found in standard English, such as David Cameron's favourite LOL (laugh out loud) and omg (oh my god). Sentiment analysis is becoming a big industry. It is used by many marketing companies and brands to track how a company is being perceived in real time. However, Thelwall hopes that in the future sentiment analysis could help computers detect their users" moods so they can react accordingly. Through sentiment analysis, if a computer detected that person using it was angry, it could play some happy music to cheer them up. Or if someone was struggling to understand some instructions online, a computer could autonomously provide an easier set," he explains. Here's hoping the British tweeting public thinks the Olympic Games are "totes amazeballs" so the London Eye glows yellow for the next few months.