TwitterViz: A Robotics System for Remote Data Visualization

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 7

Volume

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2013): Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Demonstration Papers

We demonstrate a portable and functional Internet-connected robotics system called TwitterViz, which visualizes real-time Twitter data on a kinetic sculpture. The purpose of our project is to explore how robotics can 'understand' and visualize remote data streams. We have constructed an overall system architecture with custom hardware and software that drives a robotic sculpture in real-time. Our system monitors Twitter data from the public API feed, analyzes the Tweets, and then converts the Tweets to motion on a kinetic robot. Our live demonstration of the TwitterViz robotics system fits onto a desktop, and includes the functioning kinetic robot, mini-ITX server, display for raw Tweets, and 4G connectivity to communicate with the Twitter API.

10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14370