Massive AI Twitter probe draws heat map of entrepreneurial personality

A world's first QUT-led study has used artificial intelligence to analyse regional personality characteristics estimated solely from language patterns in 1.5 billion Twitter posts and uncover hotspots and cold spots of entrepreneurial personality and activity across the US. QUT's Associate Professor Martin Obschonka from the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research teamed up with researchers from the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Mannheim. Their paper, Big Data, artificial intelligence and the geography of entrepreneurship in the United States has just been published online via the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, UK) and the Center for Open Science (Charlottesville, USA). Professor Obschonka said the study proved a Twitter-based personality estimate is as successful in predicting local differences in actual entrepreneurial activity (e.g., local start-up rates) as regional personality data collected by means of millions of standard personality tests. "What we have discovered here is that social media – how language is used in Twitter - is a reliable marker of economic vitality in a region," Professor Obschonka said.