OSU students win big at Walmart Analytics Expo

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A team of two Oklahoma State University Spears School of Business graduate students won first place in the poster competition at the Walmart Annual Analytics Expo in Bentonville, Ark., earlier this month.

Satish Garla and Zubair Shaik were each awarded a package valued at $2,500. Their poster was titled “Application of GetTweet Macro and Cluster Analysis to Analyze Sentiments expressed about Walmart and Sam’s Club in Tweets.” It explored ways to use text mining and sentiment analysis on “tweets” posted about Walmart and Sam’s Club.

“Social media is a growing field, and it is very challenging for companies such as Walmart to keep track of consumers’ sentiments expressed in social media such as Twitter,” said Goutam Chakraborty, a professor of marketing in the Spears School and the students’ mentor. “In their poster presentation, Satish and Zubair showed how free-form textual comments from Twitter can be captured and analyzed to track consumers’ feelings about Walmart. I am very proud of their work.”

Garla and Shaik are both pursuing master’s degrees in management information systems and the SAS and OSU data mining certificate, which is a joint effort between the Spears School’s Department of Marketing, Department of Management Science and Information Systems, and SAS, a leading provider of data mining software.

“We are extremely delighted to win this competition,” Garla said. “We are happy to see that the judges from Walmart and SAS recognized our project as helpful to Walmart.

“We feel Dr. Chakraborty’s guidance on how to present our work was very beneficial. Above all, winning against students from other universities boosts our competitive spirit.”