Serbian Voices

The project’s goal was to assist Duke University’s DevLab in gathering data for a Machine Learning system they Developed. Marko Galjak was in charge of the project’s overall design, which involved developing a system for gathering news articles and gathering information from the social networking site Twitter. A tool for examining networks inside Serbia’s Twittersphere was developed as part of that effort.

The premise of the project was that enough local context and understanding can be incorporated into a machine learning model to potentially predict shifts in civic spaces more effectively than traditional voices on a country by country level. Catalyst Balkans set out to implement an innovative set of activities that added value to the INSPIRES forecasting model by gathering a broader (and more diverse) range of local voices, providing context and interpretation of both domestic news and local Twitter activity, and building a local validation dataset that aided the ability of the machine learning algorithm to more accurately create a forecast for Serbia.

This project was supported by the INSPIRES Consortium within Catalyst Balkans. The technical infrastructure for the project was realized by an extremely competent Data Science Backend Engineer Vladimir Sivčević.