High Risk / High Potential Pay-Off: IARPA's Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge

IARPA is interested in identifying the most effective ways to integrate human judgement with other types of data

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Prize Challenges Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge                             

Can you create a method to forecast the future?
NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ODNI News Release No. 4-18
January 16, 2018

IARPA Announces the Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge to Improve Crowdsourced ForecastsWASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announces today the upcoming launch of the Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge in February 2018, with pre-registration beginning today. Through this competition, IARPA will challenge contestants to develop innovative solutions and methods for integrating crowdsourced information into accurate, timely forecasts on worldwide issues. The challenge presents an opportunity for individuals and teams who are eligible to win prizes from a total prize purse of $200,000 for methods that successfully demonstrate a forecast of a wide variety of geopolitical events, such as political elections, disease outbreaks, and economic indicators.

READ more > DNI Press Release

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Why Should You Participate: This challenge gives you a chance to join a community of leading experts to advance your research, contribute to global security and humanitarian activities, and compete for cash prizes.
This is your chance to test your forecasting skills and prove yourself against the state-of-the-art, and to demonstrate your superiority over political pundits.
By participating, you may:

• Network with collaborators and experts to advance your research
• Gain recognition for your work and your methods
• Test your method against state-of-the-art methods
• Win prizes from a total prize purse of $200,000

Throughout the challenge, an online leaderboard will display solvers’ rankings and accomplishments, giving you opportunities to have your work viewed and appreciated by leaders from industry, government and academia.
When We’re Doing This: The challenge will launch February 21, 2018 so keep checking back for additional details. To receive updates or request more information, email gfchallenge@iarpa.gov.
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The Geopolitical Forecasting (GF) Challenge invites solvers from around the world to develop innovative solutions and methods for integrating crowd-sourced forecasts and other data into accurate, timely forecasts on worldwide issues. The challenge presents an opportunity for individuals and teams to earn prizes by creating methods that successfully demonstrate a forecast of a wide variety of geopolitical events, such as political elections, disease outbreaks, and macro-economic indicators.

Who We Are: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), focuses on high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the intelligence community. IARPA’s challenges invite experts from the broader research community to participate in IARPA research in a convenient, efficient, and non-contractual way.
What We’re Doing: Existing methods of geopolitical forecasting include human judgment-intensive methods, such as prediction markets, and data-intensive approaches, such as statistical models. GF Challenge solvers will develop solutions that produce probabilistic forecasts in response to numerous closed-ended forecasting questions that concern specific, objectively verifiable geopolitical events containing timeframes with deadlines and locations. The effort will run in parallel to IARPA’s most current geopolitical forecasting research program-- Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC). Challenge solvers will be competing on the same forecasting questions as HFC research teams, and given access to the same human forecaster data stream. In addition to the provided data stream, solvers may use other data streams and their own data and models for the challenge.
Why We’re Doing This: IARPA is looking for approaches from non-traditional sources that would improve the accuracy and timeliness of geopolitical forecasts. IARPA hosts these challenges in order to identify ways that individuals, academia, and others with a passion for forecasting can showcase their skills easily.
When We’re Doing This: The challenge will launch February 21, 2018 so keep checking back for additional details. To receive updates or request more information, email gfchallenge@iarpa.gov.

When does pre-registration begin?	January 2018
When does the challenge launch?	February 21, 2018
How do I stay connected to get information about the challenge?	Join our mailing list at gfchallenge@iarpa.gov
Where do I learn more about the specifics of the challenge?	www.iarpa.gov/challenges/gfchallenge.html
When does the challenge end?	September 2018