Services

Qualia is a data science company and our mission is to solve complex and diverse business problems by using data and algorithms. Data science has the ability to answer your business questions and to provide you with new business opportunities. We help you ask effective business questions that we translate into solutions that combine knowledge from the fields of natural language processing, machine learning and applied math. The best projects are the ones that use large volumes of valuable data in order to ask specific and well thought out questions.

Some examples of the crucial business questions that our clients ask:

• in order to price a food product I want to understand how important pricing is for the specific product category.
• what are the 3 main issues regarding nutrition that concern a country in economic turmoil?
• I want to create a Twitter account that detects when users ask for ideas for dinner.
• is there any sign on social media of a coordinated action against my brand?
• how is my campaign perceived in terms of pleasure, excitement or key messages?
• I want to select a new brand ambassador who will influence purchasing decisions by the group of young and dynamic women, a group that is currently dominated by my main competitor.
• my hypothesis based on intuition is that my brand is perceived to be expensive because my central store is luxurious. Can you verify or refute it?

Our data gathering procedure depends on the task at hand. We might collect data from the main news outlets, from fashion blogs, from Facebook pages, or we might use your internal data such as questionnaires or customer complaint databases. We have access to very high volumes of data from all over the world. Unfortunately, there are cases that due to the quality or the quantity of the data, a question cannot be answered meaningfully.

The duration of the project largely depends on the requirements. A typical duration is from a few weeks to several months, on the other hand crises that are fierce but short-lived ask for real-time decision making.

The type of the deliverable also depends on the business question. We believe in immediate and close collaboration in cases where you have to move fast and make a series of informed decisions. In other cases we may deliver a report in the form of a presentation or a document, or give you access to our platform and its rich capabilities. In all cases we create a bond with our clients and we work as one in order to create value and to deliver superior business results.

Qualia offers reporting and alerting services if you have the need but lack the time or the human resources to perform the task yourself. The know-how of our team can help you with your media analysis and research tasks. We work directly with you, providing personalized, unique solutions that cater to your business domain and to your requirements. The reports can be one-off, monthly or weekly, they can focus on an upcoming event, or can even be real-time in the case of a crisis or the first days of a product launch. We can also help you gain an edge in your marketplace by providing ideas on how to act on the data that we have gathered and analyzed. We provide alerting services based on human operators that are carefully designed to meet your business goals. The services can be delivered outside the 9-to-5 workday and also on the weekends. You can instantly receive the important things regarding your brand, your products, your competition and your domain.

You may want to find on-line communities, to explore them and to take part in their discussions. You want to search for social media profiles, blogs, fora and existing communities that are relevant to your business and your products. We will help you find and engage with quality sources (Twitter profiles and blogs) in order to build your own community. We will help you identify your offerings that can be important to the audience and how you can provide things of value to your fans and your customers. There is a great variety of domains, such as mothers with young children, gamers, coffee lovers or even more open domains like people interested in football and beer. Our goal is not only to identify your community, but also to help you start building relationships based on trust and quality content. Once you have built your community, we help you monitor the way it evolves over time. We help you quantify the flow and consumption of information. And once we understand the connections between people, then you can use the community either passively in order to extract information from the system or actively, in order to introduce information to the system. Is it time to introduce some network thinking in your business?

When customers face an on-line crisis that may damage their public image and reputation, there are a few questions that they almost always ask: what is the current situation, when will the crisis end, should they respond and what will be the impact of their response. They usually suffer from lack of information and fear that there is strong negativity and quick diffusion of the bad news. And since almost all brands nowadays use the on-line environment in order to connect with their customers and to conduct their businesses, on-line crises have become increasingly important. We have worked on various types of on-line crises in the last few years: product recalls, a company that moved its headquarters abroad for tax purposes and created negative publicity, factory accidents, an e-banking site failure after heavy traffic, a coordinated action for a boycott of products and services, and several cases of controversial company developments like layoffs and factory shutdowns. The literature on crisis management and response is large. In the digital space with more and more users posting, sharing, tweeting and commenting, crisis management has become more challenging. We help the business leaders and the decision makers to:

• create the profile of the event and search for relevant information.
• identify the epicenter of the crisis and the scale of social sharing.
• categorize the situation as a real crisis because companies face problems all the time and they have a tendency to believe that any negative event constitutes a crisis.
• identify influential outlets and users and check who is influencing whom.
• capture the emotional patterns and understand the individuals' current psychological states.
• calculate the diffusion of the crisis and the magnitude of the thread.
• analyze the characteristics of the crisis in order to model and estimate how it may develop.
• measure the impact of your response to find out whether you have moderated the discussion and begun your recovery.

When the crisis has abated we help you analyze the aftermath, understand the key learnings and improve your crisis management procedure.

What is influence? Who are the influencers? Do they really matter? How do you find them? The term "influencer" is popular these days, yet difficult to define. For instance, celebrities are not necessarily influencers because influence and popularity are two different things. Researchers have found that marketers who pay celebrities to tweet are likely wasting their money. So, who are the real influencers? They are people that can cause a change in thought or behavior in ways we can track, especially when we can observe an entire network of who talks to whom. We have run several projects to find influencers or brand ambassadors as a potential investment for our clients. We have helped our clients learn how social activity is measured and how we analyze the networks (especially Twitter that can be modeled and validated due to its data openness). We have also helped our clients understand the imprecision of influence scores as a way to measure how someone can help you drive sales and acquire customers. We have been asked, in different projects that we have undertaken, to find an influencer for a YouTube cooking channel, to propose a brand ambassador for a fashion house, to map and see who is driving most of the discussion in the mommy community and to select the correct sports journalists that could spread a rumor. Here are some of the aspects of influence that we model and compute:

• the potential reach within a network and across networks.
• the interest graph: your bios, your word clouds, your link sharing, your hashtags, your emotional words and in general all the things that demonstrate your emotional and personal connections with different topics and people.
• the geo location.
• the gender.
• the small networks and the communities that make people more likely to act.
• the expertise in a specific field.
• the position in the network: in some cases being a weak tie between networks (that is a bridge that connects different networks) is more important than being in the center of a network.

Influence is notoriously difficult to define and measure but on the other hand influencers, especially ordinary ones, can be very powerful for your purpose. We help you find out who can have actual influence on your business. It's just that it may not be the people you'd expect!

In the last few years, political campaigns have had more data and tools available to them to make precise evaluations of the efficacy of various decisions than ever before. Campaigns are intensely data-driven, constantly monitoring their performance and making decisions based more on the evidence that they have gathered and less on the intuition of the strategists. We help candidates engineer their campaigns. We help them use advanced methodologies and sophisticated tools in order to crunch the data, understand the behavior of the electorate and win their elections. Things that we do:

• gauge the opinion and emotion of the audience on the topics of the political debate.
• measure the reach and sentiment of candidate appearances, TV ads, tweets and Facebook page posts.
• understand how the other candidates prioritize their topics.
• search for concerns and topics that are unique to the local communities.
• attribute the changes in polls, the approval ratings and the contributions of the actions of each candidate, such as public events and local appearances.
• help you overcome the indifference of people who don't care to vote and understand the arguments behind not voting.
• measure everything that can be measured on-line and use the data to judge the effectiveness of your campaign decisions in real-time.
• detect networks of political communication on-line: who supports whom; measure the polarity and the political identity of each source.
• recognize the most important issues for the undecided voters.

The explosion of data generated on-line has made it clear that you can apply scientific methodologies and measurements in order to win at the ballot box. We can help you convert information into votes.

Qualia has developed and operates a broadcast search engine for the Greek market. We currently record and index content from 10 TV channels and 10 Radio channels in real-time. Our system applies emerging technologies such as speech recognition, language processing, multimedia indexing and retrieval, all integrated into a large video and audio library that covers broadcast news and current affairs in Greece. The large vocabulary speech recognition engine uses a wide variety of audio characteristics, including clean speech, telephone speech, conference speech, music, and speech corrupted by music or noise. The video text recognition engine focuses on localization, segmentation and recognition of artificial text in video sequences. We have also developed an integrated environment for accessing and annotating a multimedia digital library, providing advanced searching and browsing capabilities. The system combines manual and automatic annotation of broadcast recordings in Greek and English. Journalists, editors, researchers and political analysts can insert various levels of meta-information to the multimedia material. Are you interested in emerging technologies for audiovisual recording and multimedia indexing and search?

Integrating Qualia with Tableau gives you the ability to combine the power of Qualia with the power of your Tableau visualizations. Our Slack integration sends notifications from Qualia directly to your Slack messaging account. Would you like to connect Qualia to your platform, your bot, or your visualization environment?

Are you sitting on large databases of customer or corporate data that you aren’t using? Would you like to learn how to extract valuable information from this? Qualia is a data science company and as such, we apply technologies like text mining, machine learning and predictive analytics so you can learn things about your data. We have done powerful projects with clients in the following domains:

• customer complaints analysis that will give your business valuable information about how to improve its services.
• correlation of your social mentions and your social sentiment with internal core data such as your sales.
• information extraction from your large collection of unstructured data that will: recognize entities (i.e. person and company names); identify relations between entities; create summaries and in general will create new data that provide information about your original data (we call this metadata). We apply a broad range of algorithms and methods from the various fields of data science.

Do you want to build something actionable from your data?

Qualia is an intelligent digital assistant that analyzes millions of information sources around the world such as news, blogs and social media, and notifies you when it identifies an event of special importance that concerns your topics of interest. Interact with Qualia in Slack, Messenger, Trello, e-mail and its web application.