Back to the future?

A BBC news story describes a curious project at the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing and the Humanities. Researchers there fed 100 million articles from various sources into a supercomputer called Nautilus. It analyzed their overall mood (looking for keywords like “terrible” and “nice”) and the locations that were mentioned. On the basis of such “automated sentiment mining” and “geocoding,” Nautilus was able to predict the recent revolution in Egypt and to pinpoint roughly Osama Bin Laden’s location in Pakistan. The main author of the study, a specialist in content analysis, believes the supercomputer did a better job than the scores of human experts who were trying to make similar assessments. There is just one slight problem with his claim. Nautilus made those predictions retroactively, after Hosni Mubarak had been overthrown and Bin Laden had been killed. The researcher is confident, though, that Nautilus “could easily be adapted to work in real time” and make real predictions about future events. So, in a few years decision makers will no longer be surprised by political earthquakes, market crashes, or any other similar accidents. IS