18/09/2026
At ESOMAR Congress 2026, IBV and EMT València presented “Citizen Intelligence in Action: Turning Mobility Insights into Public Transport Change”, developed within the European Horizon Europe project UPPER.
Raquel Marzo, Lead UX Researcher at IBV, and Josep Chiner, Director of Strategy at EMT València, shared how citizen intelligence was translated into accessible passenger information measures implemented by EMT.
AI helped us identify recurring patterns across thousands of experiences; expert interpretation and direct research with real users—especially vulnerable and underrepresented groups—turned those signals into better decisions.
The methodological value of our approach lies in connecting scale, depth and actionability. We triangulated netnography and NLP, experience notebooks and quantitative validation; involved vulnerable users and mobility stakeholders in co-creation; and used U-GOV to validate the resulting measures. This rigorous and replicable process strengthens data quality and takes citizen participation from evidence generation through to implementation and evaluation.
One of the Congress’s main lessons was clear: technology can accelerate insight generation, but its value depends on high-quality human data, scientific rigour and responsible interpretation.
Thank you to ESOMAR for the opportunity to contribute to a programme featuring outstanding speakers from organisations such as IKEA, Decathlon, The Coca-Cola Company and Google, alongside leading research and consulting firms including Ipsos and Accenture. It was a privilege to join this international conversation about the future of insights.
🔗 Full UPPER methodology and results: https://www.upperprojecteu.eu/resources/
