The Cloud Index was created by analysing over 15,000 satellite images of weather patterns, and correlating them to seven years of polling data leading up to the UK’s 2016 EU referendum. This analysis was performed by machine learning: a neural network, which mimics the structure of the brain and can develop an understanding of large volumes of data.
Neural networks are heavily employed in many advanced fields today, from medical research to social network analysis, and from generating news stories to playing the stock market. The ultimate goal of such networks is to gather and analyse sufficient volumes of data that we can predict, and ultimately control, the future.
The Cloud Index is a system for predicting voting results based on the weather. By doing so, it hopes to be able to intervene in such events in the future using large-scale weather control.
The Cloud Index is built with a set of technologies called "artificial neural networks". Neural networks are networks created in computer software which mimic the brain structure of humans and animals. While neural networks have been around for more than sixty years, the last decade has seen a massive growth in their use, thanks to new designs and more powerful computers. They underpin the excitement in technology around machine learning: the design of computers to be able to learn to make decisions without being explicitly programmed with what to do.
Machine learning is not quite the same as artificial intelligence, but it can be applied to many of the tasks that we expect from artificial intelligence. These include - but are not limited to - recognising human faces and emotions, driving vehicles, writing newspaper reports, playing the stock market, translating languages, playing games, diagnosing diseases, recommending movies, and curating social media. Increasingly, machine learning is used to predict outcomes as well as to study them, and this connection between prediction and control, which underlies much contemporary technological politics, is crucial to the Cloud Index.
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Source:Â http://cloudindx.com/technology/
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