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 Adv ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. 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 Applied science is the use of the scientific method and knowledge obtained ...

are currently undergoing operational test and evaluation by the

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

and

United States Pacific Command United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) is a unified combatant command of the United States Armed Forces responsible for the Indo-Pacific region. Formerly known as United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) since its inception in 1947, ...

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 19 ...

. 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 what ...

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 Pennsyl ...

Political Science-Identity Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...

(PSI) computational modeling platforms,

logistic regression In statistics, the logistic model (or logit model) is a statistical model that models the probability of an event taking place by having the log-odds for the event be a linear function (calculus), linear combination of one or more independent var ...

models such as those developed by

Philip A. Schrodt Philip Andrew "Phil" Schrodt (born July 24, 1951) is a political scientist known for his work in automated data and event coding for political news. On August 1, 2013, he announced that he was leaving his job as professor at Pennsylvania State Unive ...

and the Bayesian statistics model used by

Steve Shellman ''yes'Steve is a masculine given name, usually a short form (hypocorism) of Steven or Stephen Notable people with the name include: steve jops * Steve Abbott (disambiguation), several people * Steve Adams (disambiguation), several people * Steve ...

, and geo-spatial network models built by Michael D. Ward. The ICEWS data and model are currently maintained by Lockheed Martin 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.

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'' and ''Expert Political Judgment''), decision sc ...

and its similarities and differences with the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT).

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.icews.com (maintained by Lockheed Martin) International relations