Towards Collective Sentiment Analysis in IoT-Enabled Scenarios

An interesting and innovative activity in Collective Intelligence systems is Sentiment Analysis (SA) which, starting from users' feedback, aims to identify their opinion about a specific subject, for example in order to develop/improve/customize products and services. The feedback gathering, however, is complex, time-consuming, and often invasive, possibly resulting in decreased truthfulness and reliability for its outcome. Moreover, the subsequent feedback processing may suffer from scalability, cost, and privacy issues when the sample size is large or the data to be processed is sensitive. Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Intelligence (EI) can greatly help in both aspects by providing, respectively, a pervasive and transparent way to collect a huge amount of heterogeneous data from users (e.g., audio, images, video, etc.) and an efficient, low-cost, and privacy-preserving solution to locally analyze them without resorting to Cloud computing-based platforms. Therefore, in this paper we outline an innovative collective SA system which leverages on IoT and EI (specifically, TinyML techniques and the EdgeImpulse platform) to gather and immediately process audio in the proximity of entities-of-interest in order to determine whether audience’ opinions are positive, negative, or neutral. The architecture of the proposed system, exemplified in a museum use case, is presented, and a preliminary, yet very promising, implementation is shown, reveling interesting insights towards its full development.