Case studies / Citibeats
Applying Twitter premium APIs to drive social good
Quick facts:
Citibeats is an AI-based analytics platform created by Social Coin, a startup in Barcelona that started in 2013 as a social movement to inspire acts of kindness and positive behavior through the exchange of trackable social coins.
Social Coin has evolved into a technology leader but is still dedicated to making the world a better place. Its purpose is ambitious: reward actions that improve people's lives.
The Citibeats AI analytics platform analyzes any kind of natural language data - from social media, transcripts from public helplines, or chatbots - and discovers, categorizes, and synthesizes people’s opinions to offer qualitative analysis and sentimental insights that bring human meaning to the data.
Citibeats launched in 2017 and have enabled more than 20 projects for clients with government or corporate social responsibility initiatives to build more responsive communities.
Challenge
Social Coin launched Citibeats to help organizations and local communities identify and measure social trends and concerns. The Citibeats AI analytics platform analyzes any kind of natural language data - from social media, transcripts from public helplines, or chatbots - and discovers, categorizes, and synthesizes people’s opinions to offer qualitative analysis and sentimental insights that bring human meaning to the data.
Citibeats is used by organizations to measure public opinion and direct feedback related to key issues and allows them to better understand conditions and sentiment within a local community. Their clients are organizations involved with improving infrastructure, tourism and smart city innovations who want to identify and understand the reality and needs based on people’s opinions around relevant topics that drive social change. Critical decisions that affect many citizens are often driven by typical measures such as sales figures, tourist visits, or dollars invested. Citibeats wanted to provide a human layer - “empathetic” AI text analytics that mine millions of unstructured conversations and social data that take place every day and turn them into actionable insights for their clients.
As soon as Twitter’s premium APIs became available, the Citibeats team took advantage of it due to the ability to access every public Tweet via the premium Full-Archive Search endpoint. “Not having 100% of the Tweets wasn’t a problem when we were doing proof of concepts with our clients, but for project engagements it was important for us to get the full picture,” said Marc Puig, CTO of Social Coin. In addition, they were excited to compose more complex queries that became available as part of premium APIs.
Solution
The Citibeats team partnered with NTT Data and everis to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) initiative by the United Nations. The collaboration resulted in a SDGs Observatory, a new approach to use AI for social good. The team uses AI text analytics and Twitter data to understand public opinion about specific SDGs. While the SDGs are universal, the reality of how to affect change and implement solutions need to have the human or qualitative factors in mind. The SDGs observatory allows cities and brands to measure their challenges and improvements related to the 17 UN objectives created to end poverty, stop climate change and fight against injustice and inequality by 2030. The platform allows users to understand the issues specific to their local community/region while at the same time being able to benchmark and learn from other regions.
Twitter premium APIs enable Citibeats to analyze historical data so they can see how topics evolve over time and make more accurate predictions. Twitter data is at the center of every Citibeats project because in most cases it is the biggest data sample they have to gather and listen for public sentiment. It can also be combined with other datasets such as surveys, polls and other online forums to build a more holistic understanding of the topics they want to analyze.
Citibeats helps us quantitatively grasp what goes on locally and the severity of problems that exist within a community. We can derive community insights more accurately and efficiently than ever before.
”Results
Citibeats monitored the SDGs in 4 metropolitan areas of Spain to validate their needs, improve business collaboration and align programs that speak directly to citizen sentiment. In one study, Citibeats detected that a critical concern in 2 of the largest metropolis was around the environment. However, the sentiment and concerns from the citizens led to a very different impact and set of action items for each city. For one city, citizens were concerned about water, waste and air pollution at the local level whereas citizens in the other city expressed more concerns around climate change at the global level.
Social Coin was honored by the United Nations and the European Commission as the best inclusion and empowerment project worldwide.
Cities can benefit from the platform’s ability to make ongoing trends and opinions more objective and use it as a basis to make better informed decisions.
”
The next challenge is to power the cryptocurrencies of the future. We imagine a future in which everyone works less time. There’s an abundance of technology that can automate tasks which can free up citizens. We are building a potential solution for universal basic income to reward people based on how much they contribute to society. I want to see Social Coin lead this change.
”Ready to build your solution?