Dublin / North Pole, 21st December 2011

 

 

Idiro Technologies can reveal that its powerful 'SNA Plus' technology has been used to help Santa with the massive task of sorting well-behaved children from naughty children, prior to the annual distribution of presents to good children at Christmas.

 

For centuries, Santa has faced the daunting task of deciding which children had been nice (and would receive the present of their choice) and which had been naughty (and would receive a bag of coal or nothing at all).  Through the year, Santa’s research elves collect data on good and bad behaviour by children, resulting in a limited good / bad child dataset. This data is supplemented by a large dataset of Santa letters each Christmas.  However, a proportion of these letters have been found to contain significant inaccuracies.

 

This year, Santa has decided to use analytics to improve his accuracy in determining the naughtiness or niceness of his customers.  Under an exclusive agreement, Idiro’s telco customers worldwide have given Santa permission to use their CDRs for a unique project to benefit the world’s good children.  Using the Idiro SNA Plus technology, Idiro has built a customised social model of the world’s children, including all their social links.  Santa provided Idiro with access to his partially-complete database of known good and bad children. It is well known that child behaviour is homophilous – i.e. that good children tend to associate together, while bad children usually run with a bad crowd – and Idiro uses these principles, with Santa’s partial good/bad database, to develop a Social Naughtiness/Niceness Score (SNNS) based on the known behaviour of the child’s peers. 

 

In addition, Idiro is working with Santa to improve the text analysis of the millions of Santa’s letters, to identify syntax that shows sincerity or gives rise to suspicion. 

 

Santa and Idiro estimate that the use of this new technology will result in an improvement in Santa’s Good Child Identification Rate (GCIR) from an average 93% to an all-time high of 99%.  This project is funded by Idiro’s corporate social responsibility programme.