Wright State is gearing up for the presidential debate on Sept. 26 and to do that they are starting to pull in technology to analyze student responses.
“Every year Microsoft releases various civic engagement technology tools to connect people and to make life easier,” Wright State Microsoft Student Partner Lakshmi Nathan Balasubramanian said.
Wright State has had an eventful year with being announced as the host of the first presidential debate of the 2016 election season and collaborating with award-winning actor Tom Hanks to raise funds through the Rise.Shine campaign which lead to the unveiling of the Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures.
“This is civic engagement — developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to improve the quality of life,” Balasubramanian said. “As a Microsoft Student Partner, one of the primary roles is to connect and match campus needs with technology. Over the election season, Wright State will be at the peak of its civic engagement service.”
There are currently two Microsoft tools that can track civic engagement which are Microsoft Pulse and Microsoft Cognitive Services. This technology has been used to track audience responses during the previous debates with charts being overlaid on the video once the debate is complete.
“Microsoft Pulse is a live audience engagement technology that is used by media outlets like CNN, Fox News and others to collect real-time opinions from users,” Balasubramanian said. “Pulse can be integrated with live streamed video so that users in various locations can express their opinions.”
Microsoft Pulse could one day be a tool used in everyday classroom activities.
“The second piece of technology is Project Oxford, a cognitive service which is still under development but has a very advanced and extensive application,” Balasubramanian said. “Features include facial recognition, speech processing, visual tools, and a Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) which can identify and learn language structures and speech patterns.”
These tools will both be used during the Wright State debate activities such as the campus watch parties for the debate, mock debates and daily polling.
