The University of New Brunswick student, who grew up in Truro, is using artificial intelligence technology to predict purchasing desires, as well as the best time to advertise products and services. He and three other young people now run Turret Psychoanalytics, and in March he showed off his technology in Germany at CeBIT, the largest computer expo in the world.
“I’ve always been interested in psychology and thought maybe I’d go down the counselling route,” said the 20-year-old. “This wasn’t something I’d planned but it’s one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me. If anyone had told me it would turn into this I wouldn’t have believed them.”
His technology uses social media data and metadata, which is available to the public, to make predictions.
“I was looking for a better way of doing data analytics,” Arnfast said. “The issue is that they weren’t predicting what people weren’t already talking about. We can use the information available to predict what they will want but haven’t been talking about yet. Facebook has a 13.5 per cent accuracy rate, and if we get over that we’d be the only ones.
“This could be used to replace ads people aren’t interested in with ones that would interest them.”
His program uses mathematics to create variables and determine interest.
Arnfast, the chief data and information officer (CDIO) for the company, has been joined by Chris Levesque, Jingyang Zuo and Francis Morissette, who bring strengths in other areas to the company.
They have developed the Turret Terminal for businesses to access the technology and attended the fair in Germany in an effort to make sales. They have now been approached by several large companies.
“There’s more to it than advertising,” added Arnfast. “I think it would be possible to use it to predict things like depression rates in a population, so that services would be in place. My goal is to be able to do things like that in the future.”
The Turret Psychoanalytics website can be seen at www.bigdatacanada.co .
lynn.curwin@tc.tc
