The Global Twitter Heartbeat is a project put together by Silicon Graphics International (SGI) and the University of Illinois. With SGI's UV 2000 Big Brain supercomputer, a real-time heat map was formulated to recognize positive and negative tweeters across the world.
How does the heat map work? According to SGI's Facebook page, "The project analyses every tweet to assign location (not just GPS-tagged tweets, but processing the text of the tweet itself), and tone values and then visualizes the conversation in a heat map infographic that combines and displays tweet location, intensity and tone"
The supercomputer analyzes about 50 million tweets a day, that's 10% of Twitter's daily 500 million posts.
Check out the video above that displays the emotions of people by region when Hurricane Sandy bombarded the East Coast late last month. Red represents negative sentiments while the blue represents positive.
[Huffington Post via Facebook]
