[sustran] Boxed In, in BangaloRe: Analyzing Sentiment on Indian Traffic Congestion

[Vinay Baindur]

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Boxed In, in Bangalore: Analyzing Sentiment on Indian Traffic Congestion


[image: Todd Watson]

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We heard a number of discussions about the potential for social listening
intelligence last week at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando.

This is an area I've been involved in within the IBM team for several years
now, starting with some early explorations for how social data could be
informative for our marketing efforts stretching all the way back to 2008.

It's been exciting to watch this space evolve and mature, and with the
advent of the IBM Social Sentiment index, we're starting to see very
practical uses of social data for better understanding of, if not the
wisdom, then certainly the perspectives, of the crowd.

Yesterday, IBM held a Smarter Cities Forum in New Delhi, India, where we
unveiled a new social sentiment capability to assist our customers in their
Smarter Cities engagements.

We also unveiled findings from the latest IBM Social Sentiment Index on
traffic, which looked at public sentiment across India's largest cities --
Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai.
<http://turbotodd.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/ibm-social-sentiment-index-india.png>

With a population of more than 1.2 billion, India is projected to be the
world's most populous country by 2025. By 2050, it is estimated that
India's urban population will constitute nearly half of that country's
total population, straining an already stressed infrastructure. The good
news: Urbanization is an indicator of positive economic development. With
improved urban planning, India can tackle urbanization challenges and
increasing population to create a country that is poised for sustainable
growth.

*Boxed in, in Bangalore*
If you've never experienced traffic in India, you can get a taste of the
Sunday traffic in this video I shot during my first visit in June 2010.

But the recent analysis of publically available social media showed that
the worst congestion in India is primarily caused by accidents and bad
weather (three out of four times) when looking at the three cities together.

It also indicated some interesting variations among the three. 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 are between five and seven times more negative than
in Bangalore and Mumbai.

With a wealth of online content and public commentary on social channels
such as Twitter and Facebook, city officials need new ways to measure
positive, neutral, and negative opinions shared by citizens regarding
important city issues.

IBM's advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies used
to analyze large volumes of public social media data in order to assess and
understand citizen opinions are now available to city governments around
the world via new capabilities delivered with the IBM Intelligent
Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter
Cities<http://staging.internetevolution.com/admin/>
.

*Making cities smarter: the IBM Intelligent Operations Center*
The IOC -- which combines IBM software and services to integrate city
operations through a single dashboard view to help cities improve
efficiency -- is now augmented with social media analytics capabilities
that 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,
New Delhi, and Mumbai in the coming years, with sentiment on commuters'
preferred modes 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.

The IBM Social Sentiment Index on transportation in India's three largest
cities surfaced several insights including:

   - *The top three factors impacting traffic congestion that citizens in
   each city talked about most online were diverse.* Delhites chattered
   about public transportation, weather, and the stress of commuting, while
   Bangaloreans show more concern for their overall driving experience,
   construction, and parking issues, and Mumbaikars are talking about private
   transport, accidents, and pollution more often.

   - *Conversation in Bangalore around parking is viewed three times more
   negatively than in the other cities.* Despite recent infrastructure
   improvements, less pollution, and a solid public transit system, Delhites
   are experiencing a far higher amount of stress (50 percent) than those in
   Mumbai (29 percent) or Bangalore (34 percent). Most likely, this can be
   explained by an uptick in rallies and weather events this year, as well as
   the recent power outage.

   - *Surprisingly, sentiment on the topic of construction was relatively
   positive in Bangalore and New Delhi, and positive and negative sentiment on
   infrastructure in each was relatively even.* Together, these may suggest
   that the transportation infrastructure improvements being made over the
   last two years in each city are beginning to positively impact citizens.

   - *Analysis shows that the relative negative sentiment for rush hour (35
   percent) is one of the key drivers impacting traffic in New Delhi.* This
   may explain why citizens there talk about stress significantly more than
   commuters in Mumbai or Bangalore.

By applying analytics capabilities to the area of social media sentiment,
organizations are able to better understand public opinions, and city
officials can gain additional insights in order to draw logical conclusions
about where they should focus their attentions and resources.

For example:

   - *Take Bangalore, the technology hub of India.* Understanding that most
   commuters prefer private transportation, despite negative sentiment around
   parking and construction, may indicate that city officials should consider
   if it makes sense to advocate for more commuters to use mass transit and
   invest in infrastructure that will keep up with demand as more companies
   locate there.

   - *Since Delhites indicate that public transportation is the preferred
   mode of transportation*, city officials could use this insight to study
   which areas have high ridership and less road traffic and then implement
   similar actions in highly congested areas.

   - *In Mumbai, negative sentiment around traffic and weather at the peak
   of monsoon season (August) generated 5.5 times more chatter than in
   November.* If the city could measure the fluctuation of public sentiment
   on these potential causes over time, combined with specific weather data
   like rainfall or temperature, it might be able to better prepare to divert
   traffic during monsoon season or determine areas where a public safety
   campaign is needed.

"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 -- positive, negative, or otherwise
-- 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."

*Methodology: IBM Cognos Consumer Insights and 168,000+ discussions*
Public social media content was analyzed by IBM Cognos Consumer
Insight<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/cognos/analytic-applications/consumer-insight/>,
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.

The IBM Social Sentiment Index helps companies tap into consumer desires
and make more informed decisions by looking at unfiltered consumer
attitudes and actions, distinguishing between sincerity and sarcasm, and
even predicting trends.

*About the IBM Social Sentiment Index*
The IBM Social Sentiment
Index<http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/business_analytics/article/social_sentiment.html>
uses
advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze
large volumes of social media data in order to assess public opinions. The
Index can identify and measure positive, negative, and neutral sentiments
shared in public forums such as Twitter, blogs, message boards, and other
social media, and provide quick insights into consumer conversations about
issues, products, and services.

Representing a new form of market research, social sentiment analyses offer
organizations new insights that can help them better understand and respond
to consumer trends. For more information about IBM Business Analytics go
here. <http://staging.internetevolution.com/admin/>

You can also follow the conversation at #IBMIndex on Twitter.

For more information about IBM Smarter Cities go
here<http://www.ibm.com/press/smartercities>,
and follow the conversation at #smartercities on Twitter.
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