Tag Archives: Dicty World Race

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!

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.

Recap

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 questoin structure on SciCast, with most of the live links provided by users.

Near-final question structure on SciCast, with most of the live links provided by users. (Click for full size)

Some project highlights:

  • The market beat its own unweighted opinion pool (from Safe Mode) 7/10 times, by an average of 18% (measured by mean daily Brier score on a question)
  • The overall market Brier was about 0.29
  • The project was featured in The Wall Street Journal and Nature and many other places
  • SciCast partnered with AAAS, IEEE, and the FUSE program to author more than 1,200 questions
  • Project principals Charles Twardy and Robin Hanson answered questions in a Reddit Science AMA
  • SciCasters weighed in on news movers & shakers like the Philae landing and Flight MH370
  • SciCast held partner webinars with ACS and with TechCast Global
  • SciCast hosted questions (and provided commentary) for the Dicty World Race
  • In collaboration The Discovery Analytics Center at Virginia Tech and Healthmap.org, SciCast featured questions about the 2014-2015 flu season
  • SciCast gave away BIG prizes for accuracy and combo edits
  • Other researchers are using SciCast for analysis and research in the Bitcoin block size debate
  • 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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Dicty World Race 2014 Winners Announced!

The following report is taken from Dicty World Race organizer, Daniel Irimia’s lab note on Experiment.

Dicty Cells take 1st place!

The winners of the first Dicty World Race 2014 have been announced.. Dicty cells submitted by the lab of Arjan Kortholt and Peter van Haastert from U. Groningen, Netherlands have taken first place. These cells were trained by Ineke Keizer-Gunnink and Rama Kataria. The winner cells accounted for a remarkable 60% of the cells in the top 100 to finish the race.

… With HL60 cells in 2nd place!

In second place, are the HL60 cells from the group of Guillaume Charras in London, UK.

Other Top Finishers:

1.  A. Kortholt and P. van Haastert lab (Dicty) 
2.  G. Charras lab (HL60) 
3.  J. Faix lab (Dicty) 
4.  M. Myre lab (Dicty) 
5.  A. Kimmel lab (Dicty) 
6.  T. Bruce lab (Dicty) 

Read the full report, here.

See the forecast trends and history for the question: Which team will win the 2014 Dicty World Race? 

In addition to the questions for each specific team’s placement, SciCast asked which team will enter the smartest and the fastest cells. All Dicty Race questions have been paused. If you made forecasts, login and then visit your dashboard to see how you did. Watch for the SciCast analysis, coming soon.

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We’ve been slimed!

In dramatic fashion, it looks like total victory for the slime molds over the human derived HL-60 leukemia cells! It must be a satisfying vindication for Dicty Nation as they celebrate a billion years of evolutionary perfection for amoeba-hood everywhere over the upstart human cancer cell challengers. No love lost for these little human mutants though - good riddance.

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Upsets brewing at the Dictys!

New video lifts the podium hopes of three teams: #11 (Faix - Germany), #12 (van Haastert / Kortholt - Netherlands), #17 (Kimmel - US). Watch the video closely for clues to contenders in the Fastest Cell question! But don’t forget that three teams have yet to be broadcast including some pre-race favorites. These are #1 (Queller - US), #18 (Kay - UK), # 14 (Müller-Taubenberger - Germany).

See the latest video at: Dicty LIVESTREAM Video

Then come to SciCast Race Central to adjust your bets!

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Tune in tomorrow dicty fans

Race video has not been refreshed and our pitcrew is concluding technical difficulties with the video are to blame. Tune in tomorrow for what we believe will be a photo finish  between several strong contenders, and to see how the 3 teams that had a later starting time fare. They include a pre-race favorite so the outcome is anything but certain.

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