Beauty with Brain...Kira Radinsky

Kira Radinsky

This is no ordinary girl! You may find the face cute and charming but she is among the top innovators on the earth in the list which includes names like Mark Zuckerberg.
Kira Radinsky, beauty with brain, an Iranian prodigy who revolutionized the world with her childhood obsession of simulation and predictive analysis.
When reviewing Kira Radinsky's resumé, it's easy to feel a bit unaccomplished. She started college at just 15 and earned a Ph.D. by the time she was 26. The girl who landed a spot on MIT’s prestigious 35 Innovators Under 35 list this year—previous winners include nerds like Facebook’s Mark ¬Zuckerberg—has figured out a way to forecast natural disasters, disease epidemics, social unrest, and violence outbreaks. Her predictions aren’t vague or ambiguous. They are made of something much more concrete—science. Kira is pioneering predictive data-mining software for Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. 

It was during her studies at the Technion that Radinsky was able to transform her ideas into reality. While enrolled in university, she developed a new prediction method that can foresee events with 80 percent accuracy. For this software, she scanned 500 years-worth of literature, including all the materials published in the New York Times from 1880 onwards, whereupon she found strong correlations between various events and discovered indicators for future cholera outbreaks.
Shortly after she went on to win the coveted Israel Defense Prize, interned at Microsoft, earned a black belt in karate, learned salsa dancing, acquired 10 patents, launched the start-up SalesPredict, and completed her PhD—all by the age of 27, earning her academic recognition from tech giants like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Perhaps the “27 Club” curse in Kira’s case is bewitching her with brilliance? But it is her obsession with predicting the future that has catapulted the soft-spoken Radinsky to international fame.
How good can computers get at predicting events?
In 2012, when Cuba suffered its first outbreak of cholera in 130 years, the government and medical experts there were shocked. But software created by Kira Radinsky had predicted it months earlier. Radinsky’s software had essentially read 150 years of news reports and huge amounts of data from sources such as Wikipedia, and spotted a pattern in poor countries: floods that occurred about a year after a drought in the same area often led to cholera outbreaks.

Oracle of Internet

The predictions made by Radinsky’s software are about as accurate as those made by humans. That digital prognostication ability would be extremely useful in automating many kinds of services.
Radinsky was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Israel with her parents as a preschooler. She developed the software with Eric Horvitz, co-director at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where she spent three months as an intern while studying for her PhD at the Technion-Israel Insitute of Technology. Radinsky then started SalesPredict, to advise salespeople on how to identify and handle promising leads. 

“My true passion,” she says, “is arming humanity with scientific capabilities to automatically anticipate, and ultimately affect, future outcomes based on lessons from the past.”

But despite her myriad early achievements, Dr. Kira Radinsky could not shake off her decade-old obsession with predicting the future.  “At some point I came to realize there is so much untapped data that can be leveraged in amazing ways. I never really stopped to think of how difficult the problem of predicting the future would be. But I thought maybe that’s a common thought for ordinary people trying to achieve extraordinary things,” she tells.

Radinsky's developed an algorithm that predicts future global events. It's no wonder that she's known around the tech world as the "web prophet."
“It’s a very sophisticated form of data mining, enabling deep analysis of disparate events and seeing how they repeat themselves time after time,” said David Shamah of theTimes of Israel.

What's interesting about the algorithm is the way it connects the "fading" technology of printed news with the onset of digital media: A major resource feeding her algorithms is an archive of The New York Times, along with Twitter feeds and Wikipedia entries. Because Radinsky can now identify cause-and-effect patterns with this system, she can alert us to possible disaster, political events, and even disease outbreak. “If a storm comes two years after a drought, a few weeks [after the storm] the probability of a cholera outbreak is huge, especially in countries with low GDP and low concentration of clean water,” she explains to Fast Company.
How accurate is she? About 70% to 90%. The duo developed software that parses the web and composes a complex algorithm that taps into 22 years worth of archives from the New York Times and more than 90 other data sources with an accuracy of 70 to 90 percent. Basically, they're analyzing today’s and yesterday’s news to predict tomorrow’s. Her algorithm predicted the cholera epidemic in Cuba (the first in decades) as well as the riots that sparked the Arab Spring. While it may seem that a bit of common sense and a lot of research could allow many scientists to foresee something like a cholera outbreak, Fast Company notes the real innovation is in Radinsky's automation of it: "Getting a computer to do it, and to analyze accurately the massive amounts of electronic data present on the web, is another matter." 

What's important to remember about Radinsky’s algorithms is that they suggest probability, rather than certainty. When she began fiddling around with Google Trends in 2007, Radinsky quickly realized she could predict what people would search for based on breaking news stories. Perhaps the best illustration of her technique is in her findings on the Arab Spring riots. Though her software successfully forecast the riots, it also predicted fall of the Sudanese government, which didn't happen. 
Now, Radinsky has formed her own start-up, SalesPredict, a sales and marketing predictions organizations that dedicates a portion of its research to medical and humanitarian endeavors in collaboration with SparkBeyond. Most recently, her team predicted a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe that could break before 2014. It's the hope that such warnings can be used to help us better prepare for troubling times, in turn making them more manageable.

“It’s my strong desire to see my ideas implemented in the real world and be personally involved with the implementation. I intend to be the Indiana Jones of Predictive Analytics. Seriously, I really enjoy combining research and practice,” says Radinsky.


Kira now deploys her research for the prediction of Cholera outbreaks worldwide and works with medical organizations to bring this into production. Radinsky has even begun working with an organization affiliated with the UN with the goal of predicting genocides and preventing them. She also currently is looking into using her prediction software to identify people with suicidal tendencies.

for more visit her homepage:
http://tx.technion.ac.il/~kirar/