Grant: Engage Grants Program

The proposed research is directed at answering an immediate need of Smile Epidemic Inc., a Waterloo, Ontariostart-up company that leverages the fundamental principles of positive psychology to target interventions thatenhance human happiness. Smile Epidemic's main product is a social media tool on which users post taggedphotographs overlaid with a note featuring a smiling mouth along with a few words describing something thatmade them happy that day. Users are encouraged to do this daily at least for 30 days with the goal of increasingtheir gratitude and changing the way they view the world. Currently, this product has attracted many individualcustomers that use it for free. Part of the company's revenue model is to offer the premium version of thisproduct to corporate customers who will use it to enhance happiness among their employees and consequentlyincrease productivity in the workplace.In order for Smile Epidemic to properly measure happiness among the large number of corporate employees, itneeds a model and algorithms to data mine the social media tool and analyze this large data set to clustertogether similar happiness triggers, and classify participants' data into the most appropriate clusters. The teamat Laurier will develop this model and the necessary algorithms. The team will also develop a novelmeasurement of intensity, aspects of which are in other analytics for social media tools but are not the mainthrust. Dr. Hamel and her student will work closely with Smile Epidemic and the Psychology researchers atLaurier. Following the development of the data mining model and algorithms that meet the needs of SmileEpidemic, a company programmer will be assigned to integrate the mathematical model into the company'sproduct, and the team expects the collaboration to continue after this project.