Hammond & Birnbaum Release Revolutionary Twitter Application, Quill Connect

EECS Prof. Kristian Hammond and Prof. Larry Birnbaum of Narrative Science have been quoted in a recent article discussing their new application, Quill Connect, which produces a personalized report of your Twitter activity.

Quill Connect is powered by an automated narrative generation platform that researches and writes about your followers on Twitter, while providing you with a big picture view of your pool of influence.

Excerted from an Monday, January 12, 2015 article published by McCormick, titled, "Quill Connect Tells Your Twitter Story."

Northwestern startup Narrative Science has been turning data into stories for nearly five years. In that time, it has tackled reports for many different domains, including finance, government, education, and customer communication. Now the company is adding social media to its repertoire.

Quill Connect produces personalized reports of your entire Twitter history, comparing it to that of your followers. The report reveals your most tweeted topics and the sentiment of your tweets and recommends hashtags used by your followers.

“The goal of Quill Connect is to give people a view into how they are similar and different from their followers, so they can provide those followers with content they might be more inclined to read and share,” said Prof. Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science chief scientist and professor of computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering.

Narrative Science Quill™, the company’s patented automated narrative generation platform, powers the application and was developed by Hammond and fellow McCormick professor Prof. Larry Birnbaum. Quill uses artificial intelligence to analyze structured data and generate meaningful, easy-to-understand insights at unlimited scale.

People can use the app for free on the Quill Connect website by granting the tool limited access to their Twitter feeds. Quill Connect then gathers information about followers and public tweets, analyzes the data, and turns them into a story. While many other Twitter analytics applications already exist, Hammond said it’s the story and advice component that makes Quill Connect unique.

“The big advantage of Quill Connect is that it actually tells the story in plain English rather than presenting you with charts and graphs that you have to interpret,” he said.

The Narrative Science team is gathering information about how people use Quill Connect, which is still in beta mode, so it can continue to enhance the application.

“We thought it would be cool to tell a story about you rather than anything else,” Hammond said. “And let’s face it, everyone wants to read about themselves.”

Further Reading: "Robot Journalist Finds New Work on Wall Street", by Tom Simonite, The MIT Technology Review on January 9, 2015.