Want to know how long before you die? Big data tells you

A project that sees the collaboration of the University of Cambridge and Ubisoft, which developed Watch Dogs 2, is able to predict how many years you will die

The future is in big data. It's not one of those classic catchphrases you hear at conferences to scare people about the predictive capabilities of data, but an assumption that is now taken for granted. Although they are still a growing phenomenon, big data are used in various fields, from industry to sports, to improve the performance of companies.

Every day we produce over 5 billion gigabytes of data, information that end up being stored on the servers of companies that use them to improve the services offered, making them more user-friendly. At the moment, social networks are the largest source of data on the Net, every single Like, every single retweet is used to understand the habits of users and predict their future moves. It may seem strange to you, but big data is much more important than it seems and in the near future it will play an increasingly decisive role in the choices of governments and world institutions.

Tell me who you are, I'll tell you when you're going to die

To launch Watch Dogs 2, a video game about the world of hackers, the French-Canadian software house Ubisoft has decided to launch a website that, by exploiting the demographic data of the world population, is able to predict the age at which a person will die. And it doesn't do it by giving numbers at home, but by using all the data it has collected from a research carried out by the University of Cambridge. The project carried out by Ubisoft, in fact, sees the participation of the British University that, through its center of psychometrics, has developed an algorithm capable of making over 60 predictions about a person's life. The research carried out by the British University has seen the participation of more than six million people who have "donated" part of their information so that the project would be successful.

How Predictive World works

(Taken from YouTube)

Predictive World is the name chosen by Ubisoft for its project: by accessing the site, the user can decide to enter their personal information either manually or by using their Facebook credentials. If you choose the second method, Predictive World will use your actions on the social network to improve the algorithm's results. The age of death is just one of the many predictions on the website: each user will be able to find out the probability of having their car stolen depending on the city where they live, the average income they will receive (which varies depending on whether they are a man or a woman) and many other very interesting data. Predictive World allows users to look at their future with a totally different point of view and offers a chance to reflect on the capabilities of big data and how important it will become for our future.

Some of the videos in this section have been taken from the internet, therefore evaluated in the public domain. If the subjects in these videos or the authors have something against the publication, just make a request for removal by sending an email to: [email protected]. We will delete the video as soon as possible.

.