Researchers are saying that software that was previously used to monitor news stories for the government has actually been enhanced to be able to predict revolutions. Techeye reported that according to Singularity Hub, software developed by Kalev Leetaru at the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science was able to predict the Arab Spring to ten decibel places.
This software that runs on a super computer looked at the news of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia constantly feeding on data. It was able to detect compelling trends of negative tone in the decade leading up to the recent revolutions. The software sifted through news reports from nearly every country and the story elements were woven together into a web of 100 trillion relationships. The data was processed on the SGI Altix supercomputer Nautilus which used its 1024 Intel Nehalem cores to give it 8.2 teraflops – that is immense!
The software used sentiment as one of its key factors to predict these revolutions. Changes in the tone of a regions’ news documents over time correlates with the sentiment of the people in that region. If there is a major dip in tone the natives are getting restless and any dictator should be shifting their fortunes and bases off-shore before their presidential palace is stormed.
The software was not powerful enough yet to predict progression or the timing of an event, but it can reveal periods of “increased potential for unrest”. Rumor is that it is being already put to use by the US government and the CIA to monitor the world of politics. Well to run that pc they got to have military funding!