New Tech Startup Predicts The Future By Decoding The Past Wikia WRITTEN BY: SANGWON YOON APRIL 6, 2016 TN Note: This is a spinoff from the intelligence community and they are dead serious about pred

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New Tech Startup Predicts The Future By Decoding The Past


Wikia
WRITTEN BY: SANGWON YOON APRIL 6, 2016
TN Note: This is a spinoff from the intelligence community and they are dead serious about predicting the future. Expect this technology to be working alongside geospatial intelligence where locations of people and groups are factored in. This is a Technocrat’s dream as a monitoring tool to perfect social engineering projects. 
When James Shinn was working for the CIA as a senior East Asia expert more than a decade ago, he longed for the tools of a weatherman. He wanted to be able to predict that the chance of North Korea test-firing a missile within a month was, say, 60 percent. It remained a fantasy, he says, until now.

Shinn and his 14-person team at Predata have developed software that numerically describes political volatility and risk. It vacuums up vast quantities of data from online conversations and comments, compares them with past patterns, and spits out a probability. (A version of Predata’s service is accessible on the Bloomberg Professional service.) Shinn likens his product to sabermetrics, the statistics-driven baseball strategy popularized in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. “By carefully gathering lots and lots of statistics on their past performance from all corners of the Internet, we are predicting how a large number of players on a team will bat or pitch in the future,” Shinn says, by way of analogy.

Predata doesn’t replace human analysts so much as offer them a new tool. Without people choosing what to follow, metadata scraping has limited use. Moreover, Shinn argues, while risk-analysis companies are increasingly offering clients numerical percentages, the data are often pulled from the air. “This is a machine-driven, carefully calculated risk index,” says Shinn, the company’s founder and chief executive officer. “There is no arbitrary scoring by a human analyst.”

Each day, Predata monitors about 1,000 Twitter feeds, 10,000 Wikipedia pages, 50,000 YouTube videos, and several dozen newspapers and magazines in some 200 countries. It covers 300 topics, including news about individual companies, the debate over the U.K. leaving the European Union, and interest rate decisions by central banks.