“Hey Alexa, how do I make sense of millions of tweets in a meaningful way?”

That’s what computer science researchers at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at UC Riverside are uncovering with new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ahmed Eldawy, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering (CSE), and Vassilis Tsotras, professor of CSE, have been awarded an NSF grant of $1.2 million in collaboration with computer science professor Michael Carey from the University of California, Irvine.

Through novel research methods, the project will apply retrospective as well as interactive analyses on data collected from social networks, online communities, autonomous vehicles, smart-home devices, and wearable sensors.

Typically with this type of data, a single tweet on Twitter or a question spoken to an Amazon Alexa has little significance or value. But, when aggregated in large quantities, the data become high-value.

To more successfully understand this data, this intercollegiate team of researchers will investigate new storage, indexing and query processing methods to provide high-value analytics on such big low-value data.

Their findings are expected to allow for more significant insights from modern technology and devices. The applications are numerous and include studying societal behavior, detecting traffic patterns, and business analytics.