I am enrolled in a course being offered by Worldview in Stanford called “Behind and Beyond Big Data“. As a part of this I am learning a lot about how the big data is being used in various interesting ways. In addition, a couple of other things that I saw on TV or heard in the social media also has captured my interest.

Predictive Modeling based on Facebook Likes

Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft designed an experiment to see if the Facebook Likes of a person is a predictor of “private traits and attributes” of a person such as age, intelligence and sexual orientation. They describe their research here. A very large sample of facebook users contributed voluntarily to the research by participating in myPersonality initiative. They also manually inspected the volunteers’ facebook profiles in some cases to infer additional information such as the ethnic origin. It is a fascinating experiment. If you are interested in checking how well the system predicts your traits and attributes, try it out at Apply Magic Sauce.

(more…)