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: