At the IBM Smarter Cities Forum in New Delhi, IBM unveiled a social sentiment capability based on analytics to help cities around the world better measure and understand public opinion on key issues and services such as public transportation, education, etc. The company also unveiled findings from the latest IBM Social Sentiment Index on traffic, which looked at public sentiment across India’s largest cities including Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai. Analysis of publicly available social media showed that the worst congestion was caused by accidents and bad weather (three out of four times) when looking at the three cities together. It also indicated some interesting variations between the cities analyzed. For example, social conversation in Mumbai about stress around traffic is about half as high as Bangalore and New Delhi; references to the impact of rush hour on congestion in New Delhi is between five and seven times more negative than in Bangalore and Mumbai.
“India is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Industry sources indicate that by 2030, the urban areas will be home to 40% of the country’s people doubling the urban population within a span of thirty years,” said Shanker Annaswamy, Managing Director, IBM India Pvt. Ltd.
IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Social Media Analytics integrates city operations and the social media analytics capabilities will help city officials make more informed decisions by looking at unfiltered citizen attitudes and actions, distinguishing between sincerity and sarcasm and even predicting trends as they surface online. Combining the knowledge that population will rapidly increase in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai in the coming years, with sentiment on commuters’ preferred mode of transportation, could help these cities more accurately plan for needed investments in transportation infrastructure and its potential impact. City officials could also gauge where public awareness campaigns need to be administered to shift commuters to different modes of transport in order to alleviate growing traffic congestion.
“Like all rapidly growing cities across the world, there are infrastructure growing pains in many Indian cities,” said Guru Banavar, vice president and chief technology officer, Smarter Cities, IBM. “However, when city officials can factor public sentiment around city services like transportation, they can more quickly pinpoint and prioritize areas that are top of mind for their citizens. This could mean more targeted investment, improving a particular city service, more effective communication about a service that is offered, and even surfacing best practices and successful efforts that could be applied to other zones of a city.”
Public social media content was analyzed by IBM Cognos Consumer Insights, which assessed 168,330 online discussions from September 2011 to September 2012 across social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums and News Sources and derived 54,234 High Value Snippets through a series of advanced filtration techniques for insight analysis.
