Microsoft has opened the door on a new site that it calls the "Prediction Lab". This lab is designed to help predict the outcome of questions using crowd sourcing along with many other techniques and the first test will be of the upcoming US elections.
The site, which you can find at the source link below, allows you to answer questions about
upcoming events and view the combined predictions of the crowd. The first major topic will be focused on the US elections, and the team is going to try and predict every upcoming U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial race.
The site is more than a political themed engine, the platform can be used to help predict the outcome of nearly any topic once the site is properly configured. If you like the idea of using surveys and advanced mathematics to isolate the signal from the noise, you can read more about the project, here.
The product is a Microsoft Research project and is headed up by David Rothschild; his team hopes to predict the winner of each race more accurately than the traditional polling we see on the nightly news. While traditional polling is typically expensive as it involves human labor running around for hours trying to extract popular opinion, if Rothschild"s site proves to be accurate, it could pave the way for a new style of information gathering that is much more cost effective.
Source: Microsoft