The final SciCast annual report has been released! See the “About” or “Project Data” menus above, or go directly to the SciCast Final Report download page.
SciCast has seen over 11,000 registrations, and over 129,000 forecasts. Google Analytics reports over 76K unique IP addresses (suggesting 8 per registered user), and 1.3M pageviews. The average session duration was 5 minutes.
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The SciCast 2015 Annual Report has been approved for public release. The report focuses on Y4 activities, but also includes a complete publication and presentation list for all four years. Please click “Download SciCast Final Report” to get the PDF. You may also be interested in the SciCast anonymized dataset.
Here are two paragraphs from the Executive Summary:
We report on the fourth and final year of a large project at George Mason University developing and testing combinatorial prediction markets for aggregating expertise. For the first two years, we developed and ran the DAGGRE project on geopolitical forecasting. On May 26, 2013, renamed ourselves SciCast, engaged Inkling Markets to redesign our website front-end and handle both outreach and question management, re-engineered the system architecture and refactored key methods to scale up by 10x – 100x, engaged Tuuyi to develop a recommender service to guide people through the large number of questions, and pursued several engineering and algorithm improvements including smaller and faster asset data structures, backup approximate inference, and an arc-pricing model and dynamic junction-tree recompilation that allowed users to create their own arcs. Inkling built a crowdsourced question writing platform called Spark. The SciCast public site (scicast.org) launched on November 30, 2013, and began substantial recruiting in early January, 2014.
As of May 22, 2015, SciCast has published 1,275 valid questions and created 494 links among 655 questions. Of these, 624 questions are open now, of which 344 are linked (see Figure 1). SciCast has an average Brier score of 0.267 overall (0.240 on binary questions), beating the uniform distribution 85% of the time, by about 48%. It is also 18-23% more accurate than the available baseline: an unweighted average of its own “Safe Mode” estimates, even though those estimates are informed by the market. It beats that ULinOP about 7/10 times.
You are welcome to cite this annual report. Please also cite our Collective Intelligence 2014 paper and/or our International Journal of Forecasting 2015 paper (if it gets published — under review now).
Sincerely,
Charles Twardy and the SciCast team
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SciCasters represent a variety of communities – academics, professionals, enthusiasts, even students. Find out how one professor built SciCast into her curriculum – and led students by example.
Meet SciCaster Julie J.C.H. Ryan, Associate Professor, Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, George Washington University.
Q: Why SciCast in the classroom?
I was intrigued by the potential and explored several alternatives with the George Mason folks. I decided to use SciCast as a practical learning exercise for a tech forecasting course that I was teaching in the spring. I provide opportunities for students to learn through guided experiences. I integrate a lot of exercises in my classes so that students are engaged in active learning through incremental explorations of the material.
Last month, SciCast joined ACS for a webinar, Forecasting Chemistry: Predicting Tomorrow’s Cutting Edge Science, Today.
SciCast has been featured in a Wall Street Journal article about crowdsourced forecasting in the U.S. intelligence community. We’re excited to share that SciCast now has nearly 10,000 participants, a 50% increase in the last two months - an important achievement for a crowdsourced prediction site.
Contact:
Lynda Baldwin – 708-703-8804;
[email protected]
Candice Warltier – 312-587-3105;
[email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SciCast Calls for Science, Technology Experts to Make Predictions
Largest sci-tech crowdsourcing forecast site in search of professionals and enthusiasts to predict future events
FAIRFAX, Va (June 19, 2014) – SciCast, a research project run by George Mason University, is the largest known science and technology-focused crowdsourced forecasting site. So what makes a crowdsourced prediction market more powerful? An even bigger crowd. SciCast is launching its first worldwide call for participants to join the existing 2,300 professionals and enthusiasts ranging from engineers to chemists, from agriculturists to IT specialists.
Here are this week’s scores for the individuals with highest points. Scores are the actual gains on College Bowl questions that have already closed during the contest. Updated 6/17/14.
Individuals
| User Name | Score | Team | |
| ted | 3015 | Stanford University | |
| sflicht | 1982 | Harvard University | |
| ctwardy* | 1118 | George Mason University | |
| jkominek | 570 | University of Colorado | |
| dvasya | 451 | George Mason University | |
| benthinkin | 430 | Providence College | |
| bw | 290 | Stanford University | |
| Question Mark* | 254 | Duke University | |
| Hotshot | 226 | University of California, Berkeley | |
| yuan10 | 180 | University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) | |
| dvasya | 150 | George Mason University | |
| Geoff | 148 | Oregon State University | |
| peaigr | 127 | Stanford University | |
| rrich | 126 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |
| HAL9000 | 115 | University of California Berkeley | |
| MerrySeeker | 109 | California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) | |
| Beth81 | 106 | George Mason University | |
| witless | 51 | Stanford University | |
| saurabh_02 | 50 | Texas A&M University | |
| scotchval | 49 | Duke University | |
Team Leaderboard
NOTE: Here are the top 20 Colleges represented in the College Bowl. So far, none have reached 50 participants. Don’t wait! Recruit some teammates today and win BIG! Reach out to your alumni groups and personal networks.
George Mason University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Duke University
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech)
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
Florida State University
Marquette University
Northwestern University
Yale University
Dartmouth College
Michigan State University
Oregon State University
Penn State University
University of Maryland
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
University of Texas (Austin)
University of Wisconsin
Learn more about the College Bowl & participate!
Here are this week’s scores for the individuals with highest points. Scores are the actual gains on College Bowl questions that have already closed during the contest. Updated 5/21/14 at noon EDT.
Team Leaderboard is coming soon.
| User ID | Points | Team | |||
| sflicht | 1240 | Harvard University | |||
| ctwardy* | 1184 | George Mason University | |||
| Question Mark* | 248 | Duke University | |||
| jkominek | 118 | University of Colorado | |||
| MerrySeeker | 71 | California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) | |||
| HAL9000 | 68 | University of California Berkeley | |||
| rrich | 54 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | |||
| saurabh_02 | 42 | Texas A&M University | |||
| 2493c162162b15c8 | 25 | Northwestern University | |||
| iconreforged | 8 | Duke University |
Learn more about the College Bowl & participate!
Download the recording.If you need the client to view the recording, click here.
February 27, 2014
For Immediate Release
FAIRFAX, VA
Chess-related questions are the latest addition to next-gen forecasting project
SciCast is pleased to welcome chess International Master Jacek Stopa to its growing community of science and technology thought leaders. Stopa has authored nine chess-related questions for SciCast, a crowdsourced forecasting platform for science and technology run by George Mason University.
Born in 1987 in Wroclaw, Poland, Stopa started playing chess at age eight. He has been an International Master since 2006 and a medalist at World and European Youth Championships. “I have been fascinated by the idea of forecasting for many years and being a contributor to SciCast gives me an excellent opportunity to interact with people who share this interest,” Stopa said. “I’m glad I can now combine it with chess, too.”
SciCast is based on the idea that the collective wisdom of an informed and diverse group is often a better predictor than the judgment of a single expert. Part of the Forecasting Science and Technology (ForeST) Program funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), SciCast questions are generated by its participants, like Stopa, as well as by other ForeST teams at Inkling Markets, BAE Systems and SRI International.
According to Dr. Jason Matheny, ForeST program manager at IARPA, “George Mason University has succeeded in launching the world’s largest forecasting tournament for science and technology. SciCast can help the public and private sectors to better understand a range of scientific and technological trends.”
Interested individuals or parties at least 18 years of age may register to participate in SciCast at http://www.SciCast.org, or can contact SciCast via email at [email protected].