OUR Artificial intelligence measures the reaction in social networks and fixes the electoral pulse! “From ancient times, political discussions took place in the Agora, and much later in the coffee houses of modern Greece. Astute supporters were able to sniff out trends from debates and convey the news to their political party or the candidate they supported.” says “K” – and he’s right – oh Ioannis Pitas, Professor of the Department of Informatics at AUTI and Director of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis. Today, of course, the political discussion has moved to the electronic market, that is, to social networks. This is especially true for the most dynamic and educated sections of society. There, the number of active citizens can be much higher, and the flow of political news is fast and has a global reach. The analysis of these data, of course, creates a headache for the political headquarters, because it is far from easy to catch the general political image of the country and its trends. This is why the AUTh Computational Political Barometer focuses on twitter, measuring public opinion on the impact of political events online, and predicts election results based on tweets. The side strength measurement for the current week (last forecast was made on Wednesday 22.2) presented by “K” Mr. Pitas is: N.D. 30.9%, SYRIZA 24.1%, PASOK-KINAL 11%, KKE 5.2%, Hellenic Solution 4%, MeRA25 3.2%, Other 6%, Uncertain Vote 15%.

In particular, computational politics is a discipline at the intersection of political science and computer science. A political barometer is a computational policy tool that analyzes social media data (particularly political tweets) to evaluate political opinion and predict election results. For this purpose, automatic analysis of political tweets with reference to political parties is used. Tweets are collected and analyzed daily. The analysis is carried out by artificial intelligence methods (emotional analysis of texts with an accuracy of about 80%).

According to Mr. Pita, the Political Barometer, developed at AUTH as a result of a 2-year research effort, has the advantage that public opinion analysis is done on a daily basis, with a direct response to political events, and the cost is practically zero. In fact, based on measurements from May 2022 to February 22, there are no major deviations from the results of polls with the results of the Political Barometer.

This is a typical application of computational politics that could open up new frontiers in political theory and practice.

The official presentation of the Political Barometer will take place next Wednesday, March 1, as part of the AUTH Computing Policy Electronic Symposium.