Condor is a software tool developed by scientists at MIT that mines information from the Internet to come up with large-scale predictions, such as political elections or stock movements. One of the first applications of Condor was to mine emails of private companies to analyze their social networks and help determine which people were influential in the firms’ hierarchy. The software can be used to look at how information spread online through blogs, online forums, Facebook or micro-blogs, such as Twitter. Researchers at MIT continue to look at new applications, such as predicting movie ticket sales and political and social events.
Below is a visualization tracking Wikipedia edits as a means of predicting who would win the 2012 Republican nomination. Made in December 2011, the product predicted Mitt Romney would come out on top.
For more visualizations, see research scientist Peter Gloor‘s YouTube page.
Source(s): Peter Gloor, Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea Into the Next Big Thing