Forecasting

Intelligence Community Looking At Crowdsourcing For Predicting Geopolitical Events

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Seth Goldstein, a program manager for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, about the $200,000 prize offered to anyone able to demonstrate accurate forecasting of a geopolitical event via crowdsourcing.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Say you're a spy and you want to know who will win the upcoming presidential election in Brazil or what the spot price of Brent crude oil will be on a certain date a year from now. Well, you could turn to gadgets and gizmos and satellite intel, networks of agents, or you could outsource it to the wisdom of crowds. Here, I'll let him explain.

SETH GOLDSTEIN: My name is Seth Goldstein. I'm a program manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

KELLY: IARPA, as it's called.

GOLDSTEIN: That's right.

KELLY: IARPA being the office inside the intelligence community that is devoted to thinking outside the box, thinking of new ways to do stuff.

GOLDSTEIN: I think that's a fair description.

KELLY: And the challenge you've got on the horizon coming up next month is you are launching a crowdsourcing challenge. Explain.

GOLDSTEIN: That's right. We're launching a challenge called the Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge. What we're going to do here is allow anyone who's interested - citizen scientists, hobbyists - to develop forecasting methods to attempt to anticipate what events are going to occur sort of in real time.