Mercury Challenge

 In an effort to provide early warning capabilities, the Department of Defense’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) and IARPA’s Open Source Indicators (OSI) programs want to leverage novel statistical and machine learning techniques using publicly available data sources to forecast societal such as civil unrest and disease outbreaks with a high degree of accuracy.

The Mercury Challenge seeks innovative solutions and methods for the automated generation of event forecasts in the Middle East and North Africa.

The three specific event classes of interest are:

1. Military Activity (MA) in Iraq and Syria:
   • Conflict – Incident where police, military, or other state/government security forces take action in some way; and
   • Force posture – A newsworthy action of police, military, or other state/government security forces that does not involve the use of deadly force.
2. Non-violent Civil Unrest (CU) in Egypt and Jordan, such as demonstrations, marches and protests:
   • Daily count of non-violent civil unrest events in Egypt
   • Weekly count of non-violent civil unrest events in Jordan
3. Infectious disease in Saudi Arabia: Weekly MERS count.