In the ULTIMO project we’re installing a new kind of public transportation service with autonomous driving vehicles that lack the familiar driver at the front seat. A large amount of money is invested in this enterprise. Hence, it’s important to know what impact the project has on society and whether the project reaches the people and potential future passengers. ULTIMO impact- and market research-partner ArgYou is committed to doing research on this – with a tool they invented themselves.
ArgYou’s business is digital market research. When digital networks started to spring up like mushrooms, they realized the deficiency of traditional research methods like interviews and surveys. Therefore, they invented and developed a tool named “Find Engine”.
The Find Engine’s idea is to find out what people think by monitoring their search terms in social networks and search engines. In order to obtain usable indipendent results, a list of keywords that should be monitored is prepared. For ULTIMO this list contains words like ULTIMO itself, automated driving, autonomous vehicles, public transport and many more. The Find Engine tracks them on digital channels like search engines, social networks, etc. and measures how often these terms are searched for. “The results of this continuous monitoring show that public interest in the ULTIMO project is developing”, says Christoph Glauser, head of ArgYou and inventor of the Find Engine. More and more, users have been searching the keywords dedicated to the project and the early pilots over the last three years. “That shows clearly that we reach people and that we arouse their interest”, Glauser says.
The scope of the Find Engine provides even more value to the ULTIMO project: for example, the results of the machine were used for the website’s creation. Texts were created in consistency to the keywords around autonomous driving that people are already actively searching for. Furthermore, a beta testing of an Application Programming Interface (API) was conducted on the website. The API shows in real time how good a text is optimized to search words. In summation, both activities ensure that the website is able to make it to the top results of search engines.
“The Find Engine was also applied to evaluate keywords at the deployment site in Norway when test operations started there. This helped our ULTIMO partner, Ruter to form a strategy how to make a profound competitor analysis and market their service to the public by using the most searched words related to the topic of automated driving in public transport”, Christoph Glauser says. “We don’t understand Norwegian, but we can measure it’s impact.”
When strategies and websites are built on the results, the question arises as to how significant they are. ArgYou is doing a lot of work to ensure reliability and validity. IT classes at universities are programming the Find Engine for every country. The students consider the languages spoken in the country as well as the channels that are used locally. They also set them up for safe and valid use. In addition, the collected data is cross-validated by ArgYou to ensure that only effective user actions will be counted and digital impact is guaranteed. They also convert data that is collected from several countries to generate a comparable level for all results. How meaningful the data is, has been proven several times not only in ULTIMO but also in other Horizon Europe projects. It’s a well proven technology that forms the basis of ULTIMO’s research assessments on digital impact.