R2i & Carnegie Mellon Collaborate on Social Analytics Through Capstone & Recruiting

The cornerstone of a successful company is its employees, and r2i is no exception; without ours we’d be sitting on the sidelines. As a leading internet marketing and technology company, we’re always looking for the right individuals to help drive our company vision.

One way we stay on top of available talent is by visiting college campuses. In early December, along with Kevin Schreiner, r2i’s Chief Software Architect, I went to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a top university for social analytics research and technical computer science curriculum. Their social analytics center has worked with a number of companies, including Tom’s of Maine, Microsoft and Yahoo, to develop a repository of unique data sets pertaining to user behavior in social information sharing.

This visit was a follow up to our participation in CMU’s Capstone project, a highly selective program that teams CMU’s Masters in IS, Marketing and Business Management students with outside organizations. As part of their graduation requirements and to give them “real world” experience, students complete a complex IS project for one of the partner corporate organizations. We were one of only six companies selected to take part in the fall 2011 event.

Our particular group of students –five wickedly smart and diverse engineers, marketers and business analysts — worked to develop Proof of Concepts for R2i Seemor & R2iSMASH™. Seemor is a social conversation aggregator and analytics engine aimed at the enterprise marketing team. R2iSMASH is a social media platform that drives brand engagement by aggregating conversations across social networking sites into one, highly interactive presentation window.

The objective for the Capstone project, as defined by r2i, was to have the students provide more insight and advanced analysis of social conversations focusing on the subject titles within a large data sample of online conversation source streams such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and user generated comments (UGC). Results would aid users by recommending better ways to identify the conversations organizations should participate in as well as the authors with the greatest influences.

The task was challenging and the students worked all semester under r2i guidance. The culmination of their efforts was showcased to a packed room of fellow students, professors and advisors. We were led through a very technical and enlightening presentation and subsequent Q&A. In the end, the students, working with very large database sets and advanced language parsing algorithms, gained greater insight into the world of social analytics. R2i received a set of artifacts that included the data model, research results, an in depth analysis and recommendations for implementation.

R2i mixed recruitment with the Capstone project review, by leading a lunch session later that day with more than 30 graduate students from the Heinz School at CMU. We have hired CMU graduates in the past and on this trip we were looking for candidates for several full time and internship positions as well as talking with students about new technologies and development language methodologies and paradigms taking hold.

The two-way discussion was flowing, lively and very relevant. This group didn’t disappoint, responding with well-thought responses and questions. We left very impressed with the students we’d met and with many resumes to review for our open positions.

For more information about the Capstone project and r2i recruitment efforts, please contact us at info@r2integrated.com.