Dayton Business Journal...
Wright State wins patent for analyzing text messages
by Laura Englehart, Reporter
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 

Wright State University    has been assigned a patent for core analysis methods used by the Twitris system, a Web-based application, designed to extract information from posts to social media sites. 

Twitris was developed at Kno.e.sis, the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing. The patent, titled “Methods and Systems for Analysis of Real-time User-generated Text Messages,” lists Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis director, as co-inventor with Kno.e.sis alumni Karthik Gomadam and Meenakshi Nagarajan. 

Sheth is also the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor in the Wright State College of Engineering and Computer Science. 

Twitris is a Web 3.0 or semantic web application designed to draw meaningful insight on emergencies and other major events from hundreds of thousands of public messages as they are posted on the Internet via Twitter and other social media sites. 

The results could influence emergency aid organizations and others. For example, when an earthquake struck Japan, people used social media and text messaging to coordinate relief efforts and report conditions. 

Sheth leads a collaborative team of Wright State and Ohio State University    researchers who are developing ways to extract this information. The National Science Foundation    is funding the research under a $750,000 Social Computational Systems (SoCS) program grant that includes $480,000 to Wright State and $270,000 to Ohio State. The research involves both computer scientists and social scientists, according to Wright State.