On mining and detection of human sentiments

An exhausting week,  followed by over-sleeping during the weekend (our weekend is Friday and Saturday), and a 2.5 hours session with the dentist in the middle.


This week I heard in one of the IBM internal meetings some impression from a customer meeting in Europe.
The topic was data mining, and the insight has been that mining is trying to learn patterns based on the past behavior.   This works in some cases, but might not be enough in other cases; the reason is that in some cases what we actually need to learn is human behavior, and assuming that past behavior is a good indicator may be wrong, thus the domain should be extended to analyzing and predicting human sentiments and human behavior.   This is, of course, not a new area,  and the behavioral sciences people are studying it for years, one notable work is the work on prospect theory, that brought Daniel Kahneman the Noble prize (the co-inventor of the prospect theory, Amos Tversky,  passed away before the Noble prize was given, and the prize is being awarded to living persons only).   There are other works in this area, and some are being used in reality.    Getting multi-disciplinary work is quite important for enabling intelligent systems and enable predictive analytics.  More on this - later.