The Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) combines a database of political events and a system using these to provide

conflict early warning The field of conflict early warning seeks to forecast the outbreak of armed conflict, or, at minimum, to detect the early escalation of violence, with the objective of preventing the outbreak or the further escalation of violence in order to save li ...

s. It is supported by the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. The database as well as the model used by

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) is a department of Lockheed Martin headquartered in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, that specializes in applied research and development. Additional facilities are located in Eagan, Minnesota, Kennesa ...

are currently undergoing operational test and evaluation by the

United States Southern Command The United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), located in Doral, Florida, Doral in Greater Miami, Greater Miami, Florida, is one of the eleven unified combatant commands in the United States Department of Defense. It is responsible for providi ...

and

United States Pacific Command The United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) is the unified combatant command of the United States Armed Forces responsible for the Indo-Pacific, Indo-Pacific region. It is the oldest and largest of the unified combatant commands. Lead ...

History

ICEWS was a DARPA program conceived and led by Dr. Sean P. O'Brien that launched in 2008. In March 2010, O'Brien authored an article that compared ICEWS with past efforts in the realm, including systems designed by

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (; born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1 ...

. According to the paper, the first of three phases of the ICEWS involved a competition between different groups to successfully predict events of interest based on historical data. The winning team,

, combined six different conflict modeling systems, including

agent-based model An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to understand the behavior of a system and ...

s such as Barry Silverman's Factionalism and

Ian Lustick Ian Steven Lustick (born 1949) is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsy ...

's Political Science-Identity (PSI) computational modeling platforms,

logistic regression In statistics, a logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the logit, log-odds of an event as a linear function (calculus), linear combination of one or more independent variables. In regression analysis, logistic regres ...

models such as those developed by Philip A. Schrodt and the Bayesian statistics model used by Steve Shellman, and geo-spatial network models built by

Michael D. Ward Michael Don Ward (August 24, 1948-July 9, 2021) was an American political scientist and academic. He was professor emeritus of political science at Duke University, an affiliate of the Duke Network Analysis Center, and the principal investigator a ...

. The ICEWS data and model are currently maintained by

Lockheed Martin The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American Arms industry, defense and aerospace manufacturer with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta on March 15, 1995. It is headquartered in North ...

and undergoing operational test and evaluation by the

and

Reception

Academic reception

ICEWS has been discussed in papers on conflict prediction as well as papers on the coding of political events. There has also been some research comparing ICEWS with the

Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone The GDELT Project, or Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, created by Kalev Leetaru of Yahoo! and Georgetown University, along with Philip Schrodt and others, describes itself as "an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-sc ...

Reception in blogs

ICEWS has been discussed extensively in blogs related to geopolitical forecasting as well as crisis prediction. Among the topics discussed have been the utility of access to ICEWS data in improving the quality of predictions made in

The Good Judgment Project The Good Judgment Project (GJP) is an organization dedicated to "harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to forecast world events". It was co-created by Philip E. Tetlock (author of ''Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction'' and '' Expert ...

and its similarities and differences with the

(GDELT).

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.icews.com (maintained by

) International relations