This summer the Database Platforms department here at InterSystems tried out a new approach to our internship program.  We hired 10 bright students from some of the top colleges in the US and gave them the autonomy to create their own projects which would show off some of the new features of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform.  The team consisting of Ruchi Asthana, Nathaniel Brennan, and Zhe “Lily” Wang used this opportunity to develop a smart review analysis engine, which they named Lumière.   As they explain:

A rapid increase in Internet users along with the growing power of online reviews has given birth to fields like opinion mining and sentiment analysis.  Today, most people seek positive and negative opinions of a product before making a purchase.  Customers find information from reviews extremely useful because they want to know what people are saying about the product they want to buy.  Information from reviews is also crucial to marketing teams, who are constantly seeking customer feedback to improve the quality of their products.  While it is universal that people want feedback about online products, they are often not willing to read through all the hundreds or even thousands of customer reviews that are available.  Therefore our tool extracts the information both vendors and customers need so they can make the best decision without having to read through any reviews.

That sounds really great, doesn’t it?  Check out the rest of their whitepaper to get more details about what they were able to accomplish and how InterSystems IRIS enabled them to do it!