Investigating Artificial Intelligence Within the Social Networking Paradigm

Work by  Nicholas Everritt

 Investigating Artificial Intelligence Within the Social Networking Paradigm

 Abstract 
With the growth and popularity of social networks, this dissertation considers and challenges the philosophical design flaw inherent to them in that they are not a suitable channel for meeting new people but rather limited to communication with existing friends. This work focuses on the design and implementation of a tool that can intelligently match strangers together based on common interest, an idea which the author feels that if exploited to its full potential could create an entirely new paradigm within the social networking construct. This was carried out by developing a series of social network user profiles and developing a Java program to mine user data from them. Also implementing computational linguistics by looking for words indicative of positive or negative emotion within the user status posts. This user information is stored in a MySQL database where it can be accessed by the front end, a web application that makes use of several different technologies including PHP, JavaScript including AJAX, and HTML/ CSS. It functions by using an array of different SQL queries to intelligently find a match for a given user based on both common interest and common personality at least in its most basic form of optimism or pessimism. The outcome of this dissertation is an original and successful implementation of a system that can intuitively match people together within a social network based on shared interests and basic personality characteristics. It also offers other features such as enabling the user to perform an advanced search to find other users based on a specific criteria. The effectiveness and accuracy of the system is illustrated within the testing and evaluation sections to demonstrate the success of the project. 

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