Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU Jon M. Huntsman School of Business News Collection Colleges 2-8-2012 PoliticIt USU Jon M. Huntsman School of Business Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/huntsman_news Part of the Business Commons Recommended Citation USU Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, "PoliticIt" (2012). Jon M. Huntsman School of Business News Collection. 199. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/huntsman_news/199 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Colleges at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Jon M. Huntsman School of Business News Collection by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PoliticIt - 1 PoliticIt In November 2011, students at the Huntsman School noticed that the political discussion surrounding the presidential race was evolving from previous elections, as politics shifted from exclusively mainstream media to include blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. But traditional political polling does not capture real-time activity; it is weeks behind what is actually happening. With backgrounds in Management Information Systems, Finance, and Entrepreneurship, these students utilized their Huntsman School education to create a new website called “Politicit”. Using neural network technology, the site gathers information about political candidates from social networks and mainstream media and uses it to give each candidate an “It” score, indicating how people feel about the candidate in real time. So far, the site predicts the poll results remarkably well long before they are published. In December, Politicit entered the Intel Innovators competition, and placed in the top 5. In the future, the team plans to expand the site to also cover state and local politics. At the Huntsman School, we eagerly await the future of political polling, delivered the Politicit way..