The British Embassy in Croatia meets Vuk Vuković of Oraclum Intelligence Systems in their new series "What Links Us Together".
With so much talk lately about Croatia’s promising entrepreneurs, it’s always humbling to learn about precisely what it takes to achieve the successes they have today. The British Embassy in Croatia is helping us see just that in their latest video meeting Vuk Vuković, the man behind U.K. based Oraclum Intelligence Systems.
Two things make Vuk Vuković so unique: one, his company Oraclum uses the power of social networks, big data, and machine learning to predict election outcomes and uncover patterns of consumer behavior, and two - his company’s data almost perfectly predicted Donald Trump’s election win in the United States.
This is an incredible feat considering the polling industry in the United States got it so wrong in November 2016, and it was this U.K. company, made up Vuković and two other academics of Croatian descent, that not only predicted the Trump win but also almost predicted the individual state results to a tee. TCN found this so fascinating at the time we even summoned Vuković for an interview ourselves.
Asked how Vuković and his team got it so right, he answered:
“Because we used a different type of survey - a prediction survey. The established pollsters are all basically picking up these low-hanging fruit polling data, whereas we had to make our own database, which was a difficult process. It took us three weeks and we were only able to get about 450 people, some with help of friends sharing our survey on social networks, others with ads. We needed to get a bit more people in the key swing states and we managed to do it in the end.
The point was that we do not require a representative sample to make a good prediction. And I think this is the biggest problem the pollsters are currently struggling with - how to make a more representative sample. This is why our method goes beyond representatives and random sampling, and focuses simply on trying to find out how people estimate their local conditions and sentiments. And the people are pretty good at this."
Did you know they predicted Brexit, too?
The story of Vuk Vuković and Oraclum doesn't end here. In the British Embassy in Croatia's new series “What Links Us Together”, which explores the human links of those who have traveled between Croatia and the U.K. to work, study, and enjoy what each country has to offer, Vuk Vuković of Oraclum talks about his education at Oxford University and everything it took to set up his successful U.K. business.
You can watch the video below.
