The next PNW AIAA Section technical dinner takes off on a new trajectory: can we predict the future? Major events? The types of events the CIA and Homeland Security would like to predict? Even in our own working lives, we’re asked to predict the future in one way or another every day. Are there better ways to do it?
We’ll tackle some of these questions at our next technical dinner on Wednesday, May 8th at the University of Washington, in a joint meeting with the UW AIAA Student Section.
Our guest presenter is Dr. Dirk Warnaar, a Principal Investigator at Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA) in Raleigh, NC. ARA is a scientific research and engineering company focused on critical national problems in national security, infrastructure, energy, environment and health. Dr. Warnaar leads ARA’s Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES) project, funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). IARPA, like DARPA, its Pentagon counterpart, funds far-out research ideas, but with a focus on potential long-term applications for intelligence and national security. IARPA’s interest stems from failures to forecast some (possibly predictable?) world events, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring to the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate support for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Their Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) project is looking at whether crowdsourcing can result in more accurate forecasts about future events than traditional forms of intelligence estimation.
Early findings are intriguing: ARA’s first year results with ACES show competitively game-structured crowdsourced forecasts being 25% more accurate than averaging individuals’ forecasts. The plan is to double that accuracy advantage to 50% over the next year.
Dr Warnaar was interviewed by the BBC on the “James Bond” aspects of the investigation, which you can read up on as your advance homework for the technical dinner, at “US intelligence agencies hope the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ can help them predict the future.” You can also become a volunteer forecaster at http://www.forecastingace.com or www.globalcrowd.com.
Can these emerging techniques apply to other areas, including aerospace, where we’re tasked with predicting the future? Make a plan for the future yourself, to attend the May 8th technical dinner, and sign up by going to the signup page.