Social Media is the best Sensor Network of your City.

People, by using Social Networks, have become one of the most interesting and reliable sensor networks of any City.

Smart City technology in the last few years has mainly concentrated in the issues of networking, security, sensors and sharing open data. However, a very rich source of information about the city has developed in parallel (for free!) and has not yet been integrated in a meaningful way into the Smart City paradigm: people’s opinions, measured in real-time through Social Networks. In this paper we develop the idea that this can be considered as a form of rich sensor network, sending us in real-time a sample of people’s opinions.

Over the last four years we have developed this approach, working with several Spanish city councils, including the cities of Barcelona and Tarragona. One of the main lessons that we have learned is that considerable technological effort is necessary to develop a stack of processes and algorithms using Big Data approaches (with algorithms for Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Search), and furthermore that this technological effort is necessary but not sufficient: a high level of human intervention is necessary also before meaningful data can be derived from such opinion networks.

Technological Challenges

Emotions, needs, desires, fears, are being pushed to the Internet in a continuous stream. However, harnessing this information is not easy, and technology it still in its infancy.

A full stack of technology is needed to capture, filter, process, analyse and serve social media data. It needs to be shaped into a coherent set of summaries and indicators, which in turn enable a set of APIs and applications, from real time alert systems to periodic reporting.

Considerable technological effort is necessary at every level of the analytics stack that is required:

• Capture: support automatic access and querying to the myriad of Social Network sites and APIs.
• Filtering: Disambiguate the name of the city and of its main points of interest (e.g. there are more than 20 Barcelonas in the world). Disambiguate city conversation from its soccer team and from mentions in people’s addresses and job listings, which combined make up to 70% of the volume of captured mentions. Detection BOTs and other artificial methods to generate “false” conversations.
• Categorisation: Separate conversation about tourism, health, culture, security and so on (e.g. we use over 50 different topics at three different levels to analyse conversation in the city of Barcelona)
• Summarisation: Understanding which are the main trends for a given topic is crucial, we cannot descent to the level of the individual clipping since there are literally millions per month.
• Key Performance Indicators: Besides summarisation, we needed to derive numerical indicators.
• Big (Natural Language) Data: Almost all the processes mentioned above require sifting through millions of data points on demand, while receiving thousands of new data points per second. Worse of all, the main data points are free textual mentions which are unstructured.
• Visualisation: Providing powerful and intuitive dashboards to read summaries and indicators and drill down to specific mentions when necessary.

Beyond the technological problems, for this data to gain acceptance it is very important to:

• educate decision makers and citizens in general about the nature of this new “sensor” and the analytics that can be derived from them
• establish clear rules to the data collection process, its limits, transparency, limitations, etc.
• establish standards and procedures for capturing and sharing analytics denied from social media data.
• establish defensive systems capable

Opportunities

Social Network data, once properly filtered and analysed, can be exploited by cities in numerous ways. We will cite some of the areas in which we have worked in the last four years with the city council of Barcelona:

• City Tourism : We can analyse demographics of tourist, analyse comments made by tourist of different nationalities about different areas of interest (PoI) in a city. We can rank PoIs by their impact in Social Medias, track the evolution of less known PoIs which are being promoted by the City Council, etc.
• City Security and Crisis Response : Using statistical models, we can trigger alerts in real time based on unexpected Social Network activity. Depending on the topic of this alert we can channel it directly to the corresponding department (e.g. health vs. security vs. maintenance).
• Polling : sampling people’s concerns and interest before designing questions for a poll make polls more relevant and cost-effective
• Branding : we can analyse how large events (trade show, sports event, etc.) are connected to city brand.
• Benchmarking: we can draw comparative analysis of the importance (for the population) of issues in one city with respect to a second similar city.

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Article written for presentation at the 2016 Smart City Expo.

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/55049135@N00/19038712376

 

Mind Funnels Vs. Mind Webs

[Spanish version]

Communication, opinion and conversation, are becoming valuable raw materials, like iron or coal in the past. Those with the best ability to access and manipulate this new material will have a tremendous competitive advantages over the rest. Currently, those materials are consolidating in the hands of a few companies.

Imagine for a moment that someone could put a chip into every human being, translating their conscious thoughts, feelings and emotions, into short text messages. Imagine that these text messages are transmitted to a central sever where they are stored and analyzed.

Short text messages summarizing everyone’s interests, activities, desires, fears, opinions, plans and interactions, collected for every man and woman of every age and every country, in real time. Lets call this a Mind Funnel, since it would funnel the content of everyone’s minds into a centralize server.

In economic terms, how much would this Mind Funnel be worth?

Who could compete against Mind Funnel Inc. in any sector once Big Data analytics and prediction technology is put to work?

Think of brands in retail, firms in healthcare or logistics, think of the public sector, security, politics, media…Think of the Marketing industry for example, and its multiplier effect on all other industries: Mind Funnel Inc. could wipe out any competitors on virtually any sector. Whatever you can imagine as advantages, it will be only the tip of the iceberg… Mind Funnel Inc. is set up for world domination.

Now consider applications such as Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp. These applications are already digitizing a large fraction of our thoughts, emotions and needs in real time.

Twitter enables public communication (by all and for all). It is a Mind Funnel in the sense that a central Twitter owned repository collects all of our tweets, where they can be analyzed and processed for information in any way they see fit. Similarly Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled private communication, and in doing so they have acquired powerful Mind Funnels for themselves. Facebook for example knows more about the world’s companies and governments that those companies or governments themselves. They can use this knowledge to level all kinds of competitive advantages, as they are currently doing in marketing.

Many owners of such Mind Funnels allow third parties to “listen-in”, to connect to their servers and query for information in various ways. This has already spurred great innovation and growth in business; an entire ecosystem of services has evolved around Social Media already. To cite one recent example, Apple purchased Topsy (a company specialized in Twitter analytics) for over $200M in December of last year.

But the owners of Mind Funnels are very careful to keep locked their core value (and of course, why would they do otherwise?) To cite another recent example, WhatsApp was bought at $19,000M by Facebook this month, 100 times the prize of Topsy, the difference between owning the users analyzing data vs. having the

In other words: communication, opinion and conversation, are becoming valuable raw materials, like iron or coal in the past. Those with the best ability to access and manipulate this new material will have a tremendous competitive advantages over the rest. Currently, those materials are consolidating in the hands of a few companies.

So far Banks and Credit Cards, Hospitals, Insurers, Retailers and many others collect and commercially exploit our information in different ways. Are Mind Funnels different? Should we care differently?

Perhaps we simply need new legislation and industry regulations. Or perhaps this new material will prove simply too sensible and too valuable and we will need public services to collect, redistribute and monetize it, monetize our own thoughts and feelings.

Let’s follow this thought for one second. Imagine building a European Mind-Web. Like in the railroad system, once this network is built, different goods (or applications) can pass through the network, at a prize.

Future social networks and other communication applications (the future Pinterests, Vimeos, FourSquares, WhatsApps, TripAdvisors, etc.) could use this network to quickly deploy new products at a fraction of the cost, without having to deal with infrastructure or legal issues. Data Consumers (exploiting novel BigData analytics and prediction technology) could tap directly into the network. And final users could feel safe in their knowledge that their private communications, thoughts and opinions, are fueling a business ecosystem in a regulated and respectful way. Appropriate privacy and monetization policies could be built into the system to force a fair playground for everyone dealing with this type of data. And, why not? perhaps this network will be obliged to return to the users part of the wealth generated by its users.

Seeing it from this angle, an Open Source Mind-Web is a necessity, it would enable us to regulate the use and wealth derived from the network, instead of watching how a few reap all the benefits and build ever higher barriers of entry around us. In my opinion, such a network could bring huge potential for European growth and innovation.

Hugo Zaragoza (hugo@hugo-zaragoza.net)
(Text written for a Horizon 2020 European experts meeting, February 2014).