Citibeats

Citibeats is a SaaS company developing AI solutions to detect changes in society in real time, founded in 2018 and headquartered in Barcelona, Spain.

History

During its first three years, Citibeats has informed over $1 billion in social risk mitigation decisions, both in the public and private sectors, being able to detect early warning signs in fast-changing social environments. CivicLytics. (the citizens’ Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean created in collaboration with IDB) and the EARS project (the World Health Organization’s social listening platform to show real-time information about how people are talking about COVID-19 online to better manage the evolution of the infodemic and the pandemic) are two examples of how to use Citibeats’ technology for social understanding.

Citibeats has been recognised with international awards such as the United Nations World Summit Awards (twice), the COGx for the best Artificial Intelligence for public services, the NTT Open Innovation contest, and the AI for Good Innovation Factory Champion in 2020.

As of February 2021, Citibeats is an Associate Member of ITU-T Study Group 20 (IoT and smart cities) and participates in the open-to-all ITU Focus Group on AI for Natural Disaster Management.

Citibeats’ clients and partners span both public and private sectors, including governments, multilateral agencies, and private companies such as Twitter, Facebook, UNDP, IDB, ITU, NTT Data, WHO, and UNESCO. In 2019, Citibeats closed a €1.5 million seed round of funding, and in 2021 another €3.5 bridge round from international investors.

Social Understanding Vs. Social Listening

Compared to social listening, which has marketing-oriented motivations, social understanding tools are ethically motivated and contextualise digital conversations, providing decision-makers with actionable insights so they can fundamentally improve people’s lives.

Citibeats’ social understanding platform allows users to detect and analyse in real time and at scale, complex and constantly evolving narratives about multifaceted topics that directly affect citizens and that involve related subtopics and citizens’ opinions, feelings, and ideas.

The Citibeats’ Sustainability and Social Risk Monitors are two tools featuring historical and real-time data points covering topics related to sustainability (climate change and biodiversity, supply chain challenges, sustainable cities, and waste and water management) and social risk (environment, water sanitation, migration, citizen security, transport and infrastructure, sustainable tourism, and employment and entrepreneurship) in more than 100 countries and in more than 10 languages updated daily.

Citibeats' Technology

Citibeats’ algorithm analyses large amounts (about 1 million per day) of unstructured text data and other types of files (i.e. photos, video and audio files, text files, social media content, satellite imagery, presentations, PDFs, open-ended survey responses, websites, and call center transcripts/recordings) where text can be extracted. The data are gathered from open source public data sources – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and such – chat forums, blogs, and any other relevant platform where citizens spontaneously express their thoughts and opinions. The Citibeats’ method comprises three different phases:

• The collection of the data (i.e. people’s opinions) from public data sources (like news, blogs, Twitter, or social media networks, and also private data sources, such as emails, contact centres call transcriptions, or CRM notes, if authorised); or from personal data (via Input API).
• Once the data are collected, proprietary machine learning algorithms go through the process of understanding the information. Citibeats’ AI technology sorts and structures the information into specific categories that need to be measured, understanding for example what topics people are talking about (categorisation), which topics are rising, what people are asking or complaining about (intent detection), what the difference in conversation in the female and male segments of the population is or where the outliers in the conversation across geographies are (geolocalisation).
• All of this allows for real-time analysis and understanding of social trends, people’s opinions, and concerns and transforming them into actionable insights useful for governments, multilateral organisations, and private companies. Through the collection and processing of the data, it is possible to obtain different outputs such as:
  • Real-time alerts: data anomalies, relevant clusters, and on-demand cluster monitoring.
  • Leading indicators: social signals which tell you what will change, before you see it in traditional survey methods and the media.
  • Social indexes: social indexes that provide stable information such as the level of trust in government from citizens.

Ethical and Responsible AI

Citibeats’ AI platform is focused on three ethical principles:

1. The protection of the user: the collection of huge quantities of user-generated data is done while guaranteeing the privacy and the anonymity of users thus protecting their personal rights.

2. The detection of bias: Citibeats’ technology offers a representation of the whole population, reducing gender bias and calibrating the results of the research delivering models focused on diversity and inclusion.

3. The use case application: Citibeats’ algorithms help get actionable information specifically to have a positive impact on society and improve citizens’ lives

External Links

Citibeats home page.

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