Computer experts from the United Kingdom and Greece are currently taking advantage of social media, specifically Twitter, to help them predict the outcome of the general election in the UK. 

University of Warick in the UK, along with City University London's Department of Journalism and Greece's Information Technologies Institute joined forces to create an algorithm that can do this feat. 

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Adam Tsakalidis, a researcher from the University of Warwick, took part in the development of a computer prediction algorithm that collects tweets posted by politicians and political parties.

After gathering all these tweets, the computer algorithm then adds different features about all the political parties and instills the data into polling reports.

"We are trying to define and extract meaningful features out of the noisy, user-generated content published in Twitter. This includes the number of users mentioning a political party and the number of users who have expressed a negative opinion about this party on a certain day," Tsakalidis said. 

He added that the prediction of election results with the use of information collected from social media sites has already been tested before but with very different outcomes. Furthermore, he said that evidence shows their method of prediction to be very effective.

"We have now adapted our model for the UK general election and we are in a position where we can make a daily prediction and identify trends in public support for each party," said Taskalidis.

Professor Steve Schifferes of the City University London said this research will enable them to gain awareness into how people develop their own comprehension of the election. It can also help them identify early trends that could influence the overall results.

Twitter has also been used by scientists in 2012 in an attempt to predict the elimination of contestants in television talent shows.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham in the U.K. are now also developing new security technology that will enable people to vote online securely with their own personal computers.

This technology, called "Du-Vote" will help voters bypass and detect viruses and malware on their computers.

TagsU.K. General Election, Prediction Results, How Twitter Can Predict Election Results, University of Warwick, Department of Journalism, City University London, Information Technologies Institute, election results, prediction algorithm, Twitter used in election