Abstract
Social media analysis has shown tremendous potential to understand public's opinion on a wide variety of topics. In this paper, we have mined Twitter to understand the public's perception of the Internet of Things (IoT). We first generated the discussion trends of the IoT from multiple Twitter data sources and validated these trends with Google Trends. We then performed sentiment analysis to gain insights of the public’s attitude towards the IoT. As anticipated, our analysis indicates that the public's perception of the IoT is predominantly positive. Further, through topic modeling, we learned that public tweets discussing the IoT were often focused on business and technology. However, the public has great concerns about privacy and security issues toward the IoT based on the frequent appearance of related terms. Nevertheless, no unexpected perceptions were identified through our analysis. Our analysis was challenged by the limited fraction of tweets relevant to our study. Also, the user demographics of Twitter users may not be strongly representative of the population of the general public.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving much attention as the number of connected devices to the Internet is projected to exceed 50 billion by the year 2020 [1]
Through Twitter data analysis, we discovered that the public’s perception on the Internet of Things is mostly positive for the period of our analysis (2009–2015)
As they relate to the IoT, business and technology seem to be the main areas of interest
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) is receiving much attention as the number of connected devices to the Internet is projected to exceed 50 billion by the year 2020 [1]. Many see the IoT as a tremendous business opportunity. The term ‘IoT’ is relatively new, but is closely related to the old concepts of ubiquitous computing ( called pervasive computing). The words ubiquitous and pervasive mean “existing everywhere”, and are referring to the growing trend towards embedding microprocessors in everyday objects to make them completely connected and constantly available. The IoT emphasizes the network of these everyday objects and their connectivity to the Internet. Mark Weiser from Xerox PARC is often credited for being the father of ubiquitous computing [2], the notion of “everywhere computing of connected end devices” is due to Ken Sakamura. Everywhere computing describes the spread of PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0158450 July 8, 2016
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