Supercomputer Predicts Political Revolutions and Maybe More
October 4, 2011
It sounds like science fiction but it appears that technology has evolved to the point where we can now use a supercomputer to predict revolutions. Shocking I know. The way it works is software retrospectively scans over 100 million news articles from the past 30 years and uses sentiment analysis, text geocoding and predictive analytics to determine what direction political upheaval will go.
According to the Read Write Web article, Can the World’s Next Political Revolution be Predicted by Computers? this technology has greater implications than just predicting revolutions. The author states:
This is Culturnomics at work. One of the more well-known applications of it would be the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a Google Labs project that scans 15 million digitized books to reveal the frequency of certain words and phrases over time. By applying a similar methodology to news articles, researchers can gain insight into human society on an even bigger scale and in a more real-time fashion. A growing body of work has shown that measuring the ‘tone’ of this real-time consciousness can accurately forecast many broad social behaviors, ranging from box office sales to the stock market itself.
While this is still a relatively new area of study, this could have major implications for the flow of unfettered information and it is very exciting to see what can happen when brilliant minds from different fields work together. However, this sounds like the PR usually output by IBM and its Watson business unit.
Jasmine Ashton, October 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
