Peter Gloor does not own a crystal ball. Nor does he read tea leaves, the lines on your hand or claim to speak to people “from the other side”. Yet, the research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claims he can predict the future.

Take the ongoing Republican nomination race. Late last year, Newt Gingrich was surging in the polls and some pundits thought he may well overtake frontrunner Mitt Romney. But Gloor predicted he would not.

It was true that chatter on Twitter seemed to be giving an edge to the former House speaker, but analysing edits to Wikipedia, Gloor predicted that Romney would beat him. Gloor ended up being right: Romney beat Gingrich by a wide margin on the night.

Researchers are applying similar methods to predict social protests, wars, and even terrorist attacks. But the U.S. presidential elections are likely to be the real testing ground for social media prediction, at least for the next year.

Government Computer News reports

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The game is designed around an emergency that requires a humanitarian response and help from the public in identifying assets such as water, food, fuel and other supplies. One example DARPA offers: Is there a company in Detroit with all-terrain cycles it is willing to donate to an area hit by an earthquake? How would the company know the cycles are needed in that area? And if it will donate the vehicles, which organization does it contact?

CLIQR Quest Challenge follows up on other DARPA-sponsored work looking at social networking and social media, such as the 2009 Network Challenge, which required participants to help spot red balloons released across the United States.

“The Social Networking Training Course is a proactive approach to information gathering through Social Networks…,” says new announcement. The training, which is scheduled to start at the end of November at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is supposed to include instruction on such areas as “Building and Managing the Social Network.”

But the Army isn’t trying to cull information from social networking sites, like Facebook. Instead, the focus is on understanding and controlling people’s social networks through a variety of techniques, ranging from conducting interviews to collecting biometrics.

Understanding social networks, particularly adversaries’ social networks, is an area of increasing interest to the military, particularly in operations conducted against insurgent and terrorist groups. This training appears to reflect this new analytical approach to intelligence collection.

The goal of the training, says the Army, is to teach ways of “identifying, predicting, and managing adversarial individuals who are not cooperative with military operational interests.”

See the full announcement here.