Microsoft / Technion effort mines old news for predictions
Sunday, February 3, 2013 - 08:50
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org)—Microsoft Research and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have been working on software that can predict events. The pursuit could lead to a tool that can provide better information that goes beyond conclusions and forecasts drawn from human expertise, educated guesses, and intuition. The software might help mine data toward the goal of knowing when outbreaks of disease or outbreaks of violence could occur, among other kinds of information. The software collaboration has involved testing with over 20 years' worth of New York Times articles, taken from an archive from 1986 to 2007, along with various Web data sources, to establish better ways of seeing what leads to major events such as disease and violence.