Predicting the Future by Spying on Twitter

In 2009,Google with its Flu Trends site

managed to identify the next flu outbreak faster than the US government did.

Now,

the government is following the search giant's lead. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency announced a program aimed at predicting future events by tracking social media, blogs, internet traffic, webcams and other online sources.

It's called ‘open source intelligence';

the agency will scour through all information available freely and attempt to sort out the important signals from the noise. As Wired.com puts it: “Get every open source piece of information you can, and use it to predict every kind of outcome you can.”

As such,

IARPA would collect and analyze the data, and hopefully will be able to “beat the news”. The program hopes future events such as natural disasters, pandemics and political or economic crises can be ‘predicted' and averted via this method.

This is

almost like Minority Report come to life—with computer as telepath.

Via Design Taxi News. DesignTAXI is a daily news and editorial site interested in the overlap between design and technology.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

Predicting the Future by Spying on Twitter