Congratulations to the winners of the Combo Edits Contest! We’ve awarded $16,000 proportionately to our top forecasters for their efforts during a month long period. This contest encouraged SciCasters to add their own links.
Drumroll, please…
SciCasters:
Thank you for your participation over the past year and a half in the largest collaborative S&T forecasting project, ever. Our main IARPA funding has ended, and we were not able to finalize things with our (likely) new sponsor in time to keep the question-management, user support, engineering support, and prizes running uninterrupted. Therefore we will be suspending SciCast Predict for the summer, starting June 12, 2015 at 4 pm ET. We expect to resume in the Fall with the enthusiastic support of a big S&T sponsor. In the meantime, we will continue to update the blog, and provide links to leaderboard snapshots and important data.
Through the course of this project, we’ve seen nearly 130,000 forecasts from thousands of forecasters on over 1,200 forecasting questions, and an average of >240 forecasts per day. We created a combinatorial engine robust enough to allow crowdsourced linking, resulting in the following rich domain structure:
Near-final question structure on SciCast, with most of the live links provided by users. (Click for full size)
Some project highlights:
MIT and ANU researchers studied SciCast accuracy and efficiency, and were unable to improve using stock machine learning — a testimony to our most active forecasters and their bots. [See links for Della Penna, Adjodah, and Pentland 2015, here.]
What’s Next?
Prizes for the combo edits contest will be sent out this week, and we will be sharing a blog post summarizing the project. Although SciCast.org will be closed, this blog will remain open as well as the user group. Watch for announcements regarding future SciCast.
Once again, thank you so much for your participation! We’re nothing without our crowd.
Contact
Please contact us at [email protected] if you have questions about the research project or want to talk about using SciCast in your own organization.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
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SciCast’s unique feature is the ability to make conditional edits, also called assumptions or combinatorial edits. Now you’ll have a chance to compete for big prizes for your making at least at least 25% of your forecasts conditional forecasts. combo edits! Continue reading
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Q: Expected value? So, if I’m betting that A happens, shouldn’t I just make P(A)=99%?
A: If you knew exactly when we would calculate the expected value, this would be a profitable strategy. But (a) we will randomize, and (b) we have selected questions many questions are still likely to resolve, so there is some risk.
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