Microsoft is on a roll in predicting the future when it comes to huge events, including the Academy Awards.
The algorithm developed by company researcher David Rothschild generated correct predictions for the Oscar winners among all top six categories: best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and best supporting actress.
The formula accurately predicted the results that dark comedy ‘Birdman’ will receive the Best Picture award while Mexican filmmaker and ‘Birdman’ director Alejandro G. Iñarritu will be recognized with top honors for his approach to directing.
It was also predicted that Eddie Redmayne of ‘The Theory of Everything’ will win as Best Actor while Julianne Moore who starred in ‘Still Alice’ was expected to win as best Actress.
For supporting roles, J.K. Simmons of ‘Whiplash’ and Patricia Arquette of ‘Boyhood’ were correctly predicted to bag the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress award, respectively.
To sump it up, the Microsoft algorithm generated correct predictions of winners for 20 of the 24 categories in the Oscars this year.
Known for specializing on predictive analytics, Rothschild has developed such model in the past years to effectively predict Oscar winners. Last year, the formula accurately predicted 21 out of 24 Oscar winners and in 2013, it also predicted 19 of the 24 winners.
“Whenever I create predictions I focus on several attributes beyond accuracy, including flexibility, scalability, and timeliness,” Rothschild said in a Microsoft Research blog.
Aside from the Ocars, Microsoft's algorithms have also generated prediction results for other events, including the World Cup 2014 and other football games.
Microsoft’s Cortana has also been integrated with the prediction model to work with the Bing search engine in order to come up with possible outcomes when it comes to award shows and sporting events. Other predictions from Rothschild relating to entertainment, sports and politics can be checked at the official Predict Wise website.
On the whole, Microsoft can view such opportunities to prove its capabilities in generating and using data sets. Walter Sun, Bing’s Core Ranking Team manager, previously shared the significance of such algorithms in generating search results.
“The main goal is to show people that Bing algorithms and data itself is a pretty powerful force in terms of what we can do,” Sun said in a Microsoft blog post last summer. “[These] things are an interesting way to show users that Bing has a lot of horsepower beyond just providing good search results.”
