14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Bing prediction engine has once again managed to amaze the whole world after having correctly guessed most of the winners at this year's Academy Awards.
This year's predictions, which were published by the Bing team last week, were entirely based on a system developed by David Rothschild, a Microsoft Research engineer based in New York City, who already has a good track on predicting Oscars winners.
Rothschild's systems was also used by Microsoft for guessing the Academy Awards winners in 2013, and 19 out of the 24 were accurately indicated.
This year, the accuracy rate was increased to 84 percent (20 out of 24 results were correct), as Bing predicted the winners of the best actor, best actress, best supporting actress, best documentary feature, best visual effects, and best picture categories.
The same Bing prediction engine has recently been expanded to indicate the results of Premium League football matches, after having correctly guessed the winner of World Cup 2014 matches in Brazil. In the United Kingdom, Bing analyzes a wide array of data to correctly indicate the winner, which Microsoft details in the following paragraph:
“Bing Predicts leverages a prior statistical model which estimates historical strength of teams (wins and losses, margin of victory, location of matches, weather conditions, etc.) and then incorporates our knowledge of web activity and social data (adding the ‘wisdom of the crowds’) to refine and improve our models.”
Also available in Cortana
Microsoft's prediction system is also integrated into personal assistant Cortana, which is currently available on Windows Phone and soon to be released on PCs as well.
Powered by the Bing search engine, Cortana also features prediction capabilities, so it's basically enough to ask the assistant to find out the outcome of a certain match. Obviously, that could really come in handy to gamblers, but keep in mind that all these predictions aren't 100 percent accurate, so don’t blame Microsoft if you lose a fortune in online gambling.