Predicting Egypt – Could Cloud Computing Have Helped?

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:00:00 EDT

On January 25, 2011 the overthrow of the Egyptian government began – quietly at first, with non-violent demonstrations of long-held grievances. But, by February 11 Mubarak had resigned, the government of a long-stable country had been overturned and the future of the entire region was altered forever. With the overwhelming amount of web content and social media we are compelled to ask: “could we have seen this coming?” Yes, is the answer – provided we’re willing to look at information in a new way. To a person analyzing “big data,” this means that we must include the broadest range of data available. Increasingly, social media and other web-based content represent a rich source of timely information and would be very useful to a broader understanding of people, events, organizations, etc. However, these new data sources come with complications like volume, validity, and understanding in context. We decided to explore this issue in more detail. We wanted to find out what connections could be uncovered when the data came from social media and web content.

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Predicting Egypt – Could Cloud Computing Have Helped?