Government Aims to Build a 'Data Eye in the Sky'

More than 60 years ago, in his "Foundation" series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science - psychohistory - that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future.

Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet - Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones - to do the same thing.

The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of "big data" will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior - enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena.

The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for "big data," according to a research proposal being circulated by the agency. The three-year experiment, to begin in April, is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa (pronounced eye-AR-puh), part of the office of the director of national intelligence.

The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries.

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