Can we use data to predict the election?

Published in

Ricoh Digital Services

5 min readDec 11, 2019

IoT at the Confederation of British Industry Conference

Each November, the CBI Conference — the UK’s highest profiled business conference — brings together expert speakers, from political leaders to CEOs of leading brands, to discuss how to meet the UK’s social and economic challenges to bolster our position in the global marketplace.

As a close partner to the CBI, Ricoh regularly host a stand at the event to discuss the latest developments that we have to offer. This year, we took the opportunity to go one step further and install a live demonstration of the Ricoh Digital Services Smart Spaces Platform.

Here’s what we set out to learn:

Can we use data to predict who will win the election?
Which areas are the most utilised and when?
What effect does temperature and CO2 levels have on the attendees behaviour?

Here’s what we did…

Nathan Thomas (our Digital Product & Software Engineering Lead) led from the front, arriving early on Sunday morning to begin setting up for the demonstration.

It was key to ensure the different sensors were placed correctly around the conference to enable detail to be captured on data such as activity, temperatures and CO2 levels.

We partnered with IA Connects using a combination of Passive Infrared and backup thermal elements to detect presence of a person’s body heat.

We’re using cutting edge technologies such as Google Firebase, Azure Data Warehouse and Power BI to collect and process the data into a reportable format. This processing is represented in real time on the dashboard below.

What does the data predict?

The running order was as follows:
10:45am — 11:10am: Boris Johnson, Prime Minister
11:15am — 11:45am: RT Hon Jeremy Corbyn, MP
14:25am — 14:55am: Jo Swinson, MP

With the most important General Election of recent generations looming, it’s no surprise that all eyes were on the keynote speeches from Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson, causing a dramatic dip in occupancy elsewhere.

The data shows that Boris Johnson held the highest attendance with some people returning back into the main conference lobby before Jeremy Corbyn took to the stage. Jo Swinson was on later in the afternoon, and the data suggests that less people attended her session than either of the other two. Is this a reflection of how the votes will go on the 12th December? Only time will tell.

What area had the most footfall?

With the world’s media in attendance, the conference media rooms, specifically those dedicated to BBC and ITN proved to be the most utilised spaces at the event.

The attendance in these spaces hit its highest after the keynote speeches were complete, with the journalists no doubt in a race to publish the first news story from the event.

Did we learn anything from CO2 or temperature data?

We can see that as population rose in certain areas, so too did the temperature, which is to be expected. With additional IoT sensors in the correct locations, we could provide enhanced analytics to understand the impact this may have on attendees behaviour.

The data also shows that CO2 levels stayed at a healthy range throughout the day, though it did peak early morning when presumably the air conditioning was turned off.

In conclusion..

Ricoh were delighted to present our Smart Spaces Platform using our strong partnerships with IA Connects, and the CBI to provide insights from IoT in real time at the CBI Conference.

Now is the time to capitalise on this momentum and further develop the IoT offering at the CBI events. We continue to work closely with the CBI to further improve the experience of the attendees, considering things such as…

Do they have enough space for media or should this be increased next year in line with demand?
Was the timing of the keynote speeches correct and did they get a suitable attendance for each of them? Did they get the order of speeches correct?
Do they need to keep a closer eye on the temperature and be notified should it rise past a certain point to ensure comfort levels remain consistent?
Is there a particular area or item on the agenda that they would like to get more focus and attention? How can they use the data captured to target that? Is there a particular time that they should plan this for? Is there a particular area that seems more utilised than others?

The people go to the polls on the 12th December. Will the results reflect the data captured at the CBI Conference? Watch this space.