Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fueled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19’s informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning (ML) classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91% for short Tweets, with the Naïve Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created complex challenges and adverse circumstances. This research identifies public sentiment amidst problematic socioeconomic consequences of the lockdown, and explores ensuing four potential public sentiment associated scenarios. The severity and brutality of COVID-19 have led to the development of extreme feelings, and emotional and mental healthcare challenges. This research focuses on emotional consequences - the presence of extreme fear, confusion and volatile sentiments, mixed along with trust and anticipation. It is necessary to gauge dominant public sentiment trends for effective decisions and policies. This study analyzes public sentiment using Twitter Data, timealigned to the COVID-19 reopening debate, to identify dominant sentiment trends associated with the push to reopen the economy. Present research uses textual analytics methodologies to analyze public sentiment support for two potential divergent scenarios - an early opening and a delayed opening, and consequences of each. Present research concludes on the basis of textual data analytics, including textual data visualization and statistical validation, that tweets data from American Twitter users shows more positive sentiment support, than negative, for reopening the US economy. This research develops a novel sentiment polarity based public sentiment scenarios (PSS) framework, which will remain useful for future crises analysis, well beyond COVID-19. With additional validation, this research stream could present valuable time sensitive opportunities for state governments, the federal government, corporations and societal leaders to guide local and regional communities, and the nation into a successful new normal future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in human society, and yet vast segments of the global population have no, little, or counterproductive information about AI. It is necessary to teach AI topics on a mass scale. While there is a rush to implement academic initiatives, scant attention has been paid to the unique challenges of teaching AI curricula to a global and culturally diverse audience with varying expectations of privacy, technological autonomy, risk preference, and knowledge sharing. Our study fills this void by focusing on AI elements in a new framework titled Culturally Adaptive Thinking in Education for AI (CATE-AI) to enable teaching AI concepts to culturally diverse learners. Failure to contextualize and sensitize AI education to culture and other categorical human-thought clusters, can lead to several undesirable effects including confusion, AI-phobia, cultural biases to AI, increased resistance toward AI technologies and AI education. We discuss and integrate human behavior theories, AI applications research, educational frameworks, and human centered AI principles to articulate CATE-AI. In the first part of this paper, we present the development a significantly enhanced version of CATE. In the second part, we explore textual data from AI related news articles to generate insights that lay the foundation for CATE-AI, and support our findings. The CATE-AI framework can help learners study artificial intelligence topics more effectively by serving as a basis for adapting and contextualizing AI to their sociocultural needs.

There is a compelling and pressing need to better understand the temporal dynamics of public sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines in the US on a national and state-wise level for facilitating appropriate public policy applications. Our analysis of social media data from early February and late March 2021 shows that, despite the overall strength of positive sentiment and despite the increasing numbers of Americans being fully vaccinated, negative sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines still persists among segments of people who are hesitant towards the vaccine. In this study, we perform sentiment analytics on vaccine tweets, monitor changes in public sentiment over time, contrast vaccination sentiment scores with actual vaccination data from the US CDC and the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), explore the influence of maturity of Twitter user-accounts and generate geographic mapping of tweet sentiments. We observe that fear sentiment remained unchanged in populous states, whereas trust sentiment declined slightly in these same states. Changes in sentiments were more notable among less populous states in the central sections of the US. Furthermore, we leverage the emotion polarity based Public Sentiment Scenarios (PSS) framework, which was developed for COVID-19 sentiment analytics, to systematically posit implications for public policy processes with the aim of improving the positioning, messaging, and administration of vaccines. These insights are expected to contribute to policies that can expedite the vaccination program and move the nation closer to the cherished herd immunity goal.

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have led to significant developments in optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. OCR applications, using AI techniques for transforming images of typed text, handwritten text, or other forms of text into machine-encoded text, provide a fair degree of accuracy for general text. However, even after decades of intensive research, creating OCR with human-like abilities has remained evasive. One of the challenges has been that OCR models trained on general text do not perform well on localized or personalized handwritten text due to differences in the writing style of alphabets and digits. This study aims to discuss the steps needed to create an adaptive framework for OCR models, with the intent of exploring a reasonable method to customize an OCR solution for a unique dataset of English language numerical digits were developed for this study. We develop a digit recognizer by training our model on the MNIST dataset with a convolutional neural network and contrast it with multiple models trained on combinations of the MNIST and custom digits. Using our methods, we observed results comparable with the baseline and provided recommendations for improving OCR accuracy for localized or personalized handwritten text. This study also provides an alternative perspective to generating data using conventional methods, which can serve as a gold standard for custom data augmentation to help address the challenges of scarce data and data imbalance.

Conjunct with the universal acceleration in information growth, financial services have been immersed in an evolution of information dynamics. It is not just the dramatic increase in volumes of data, but the speed, the complexity and the unpredictability of ‘big-data’ phenomena that have compounded the challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in financial services. Math, statistics and technology have been leveraged creatively to create analytical solutions. Given the many unique characteristics of financial bid data (FBD) it is necessary to gain insights into strategies and models that can be used to create FBD specific solutions. Behavioral finance data, a subset of FBD, is seeing exponential growth and this presents an unprecedented opportunity to study behavioral finance employing big data analytics methodologies. The present study maps machine learning (ML) techniques and behavioral finance categories to explore the potential for using ML techniques to address behavioral aspects in FBD. The ontological feasibility of such an approach is presented and the primary purpose of this study is propositioned: ML based behavioral models can effectively estimate performance in FBD. A simple machine learning algorithm is successfully employed to study behavioral performance in an artificial stock market to validate the propositions.