“You may have ecological monitoring tools in place, but not economic or social monitoring, which can give you a much earlier signal that something is happening,” says Victor Galaz, lead author of a paper published by the researchers last month in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. “For example, if prices for a certain species of fish increase, or you receive news of heavy investment in high-tech fishing fleets in a particular region, that can give you an early warning that change is occurring.”
Sifting through the huge amount of information on the Web and determining the “signal” from the “noise” is still difficult, even with advanced monitoring tools. Whether Web-crawler systems are truly able to extract reliable data on emerging crises from Internet chatter, or whether they merely spot patterns in hindsight, is still open to debate.
Gaps also exist in the coverage of developing countries, where news sources are fewer. Mark Smolinski, director of Predict and Prevent, said the next step for HealthMap will be “engaging directly with citizens to report illness, something now entirely possible as mobile technologies permeate the globe.”
Predictive monitoring tools may also provide early warning of conflicts — outbreaks of rioting could foreshadow a larger crisis. Veratect Corporation already operates a service called Shadowstream, which identifies emerging civil unrest around the world for corporate clients.
“We focused on infectious diseases because of their widespread nature and real-time development,” Freifeld says. “But we’re looking at where else the technology can be applied, such as conflicts or environmental disasters.”
Web crawlers could even predict the next financial crisis. The 2021 credit crunch? You can’t say you weren’t warned.
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