You may notice similarities between the LifeBrowser program in the above video and Facebook’s Timeline. The two do indeed have similarities, however Facebook’s Timeline does not currently employ any type of machine learning to analyze the data as LifeBrowser does. Notice that, unlike the above video’s demo of LifeBrowser, if Facebook was to provide a backend similar to LifeBrowser, it could access a database containing information pertaining to large populations instead of just one individual.
One particular type of analysis of large samples of data is called predictive analytics. The prospect of analyzing the data belonging to large populations for predictive purposes is of particular interest to marketers, as is apparent from this New York Times article that describes how Target Stores is able to predict with good accuracy which of it’s customers are pregnant using current technology tracking sales coupon, credit card, and gift registry use.
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