Univ. of Ill. Professor Says Supercomputer Can Predict Future World Events
By Chuck Sudo in News on Sep 12, 2011 7:30PM
University of Illinois Professor Kalev Leetaru
Kalev Leetaru, a Research Coordinator at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy and a Senior Research Scientist for Content Analysis at U of I's Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, monitored information from the government-run Open Source Center, social media, BBC Monitoring, the New York Times Archives and other news outlets which publish online content from around the globe. In total, Leetaru collected over 100 million articles which were then fed into a Nautilus supercomputer at the University of Tennessee.
The articles were analyzed for mood and location. Based on specific findings, the Nautilus computer was determine the decreasing popularity of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak months before his ouster triggered the "Arab Spring."
Leetaru explains the graph to the BBC.
"If you look at this tonal curve it would tell you the world is darkening so fast and so strongly against him that it doesn't seem possible he could survive."Similar drops were seen ahead of the revolution in Libya and the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.
Leetaru told BBC News his system seemed to more accurately predict what was happening in the Middle East in comparison to intelligence U.S. officials had at the same time.
"The mere fact that the US President stood in support of Mubarak suggests very strongly that that even the highest level analysis suggested that Mubarak was going to stay there," he told BBC News."That is likely because you have these area experts who have been studying Egypt for 30 years, and in 30 years nothing has happened to Mubarak.
Leetaru believes his system can work in real time, given some modifications, and is already working on the technology. But can it predict a World Cup bracket better than a squid or make stock market picks better than a monkey?
Read Leetaru's report here.