thymio_twitter

Using Twitter + NLP to give Thymio artificial (emotional) intelligence

View the Project on GitHub elliotvaucher/thymio_twitter

Thymio X Twitter

Summary

Thymio is an open-source educational robot designed by researchers from the EPFL, in collaboration with ECAL, and produced by Mobsya, a nonprofit association whose mission is to offer comprehensive, engaging STEAM journeys to learners of all ages.

This repository showcases a proof of concept I wrote for a webinar about the Thymio robot1 that connects to the Twitter API, fetches recent tweets where Thymio is mentioned, performs sentiment analysis on the content of the tweets, and activates the green Thymio leds if the result is positive, and the red leds if it’s negative. Thus, it gives Thymio a kind of artificial emotionnal intelligence.

Further developments would include improving the quality of my code, obviously, but also bringing the concept of creating a bridge between live feeds via API’s and actual robots reacting to this live information. Using Machine Learning on live feeds of information seems like an interesting path in giving connected objects a kind of autonomous and spontaneous intelligence.

Libraries

The main program uses the following libraries :

Installation

Documentation

Here are the html slides I prepared for the actual webinar about the Thymio robot.

Note : this presentation was written in markdown via this tool

The source markdown file is visible here, for information.

Credits

The functions for sentiment analysis using textblob were taken from this tutorial The step by step guide for setting-up Twitter API keys comes from here

  1. The webinar presents a Python library used to control the robot with Python code. More information about controling Thymio with Python can be found here