U.S. government turns to crowdsourcing for intelligence.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

* The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community spend billions of dollars each year trying, with mild success at best, to predict the future.

They organize elaborate wargames, develop computer algorithms to digest information and rely on old-fashioned aggregation of professional opinion.

Past intelligence failures have been costly and damaging to U.S. national security. Trying to avoid previous pitfalls, agencies are on a constant treasure hunt for new technologies that might give them an edge.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in February solicited industry proposals for how to improve the accuracy of intelligence forecasting. Under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, IARPA invests in research programs that provide an "overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries."

Applied Research Associates, a New Mexico-based firm, has launched a program it hopes will improve upon the traditional methods of gathering expert opinion by using computer software that could make better-informed predictions. The system chooses the best sources of information from a huge pool of participants.

ARA won the bid and started working on its Aggregative Contingent Estimation System, or ACES, in May.

The firm's southeast division, headquartered in Raleigh, N.G, has teamed with seven universities to devise a method of farming out global intelligence questions to the general public through the Internet. It began collecting crowdsourced opinions in early July.

Crowdsourcing is a method of problem solving where a task is doled out to an undefined group of people through an open call to participate.

"Anyone can sign up; the more the merrier," said Dirk Warnaar; ARAs principal investigator for the ACES project. Participants interested in a range of topics, including politics, military, economics, science, technology and social affairs are invited to register at: www.forecastingACE.com.

"You can look at the crowd as people who are on the ground in real-life situations who have the best information," Warnaar said. "Think of it like a large group of foot soldiers providing feedback."

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The crowd should eventually be able to provide more accurate predictions on global conflict in a time of increased uncertainty Warnaar said.

"We don't want to rule anyone out," Warnaar said in an interview. "The term 'expert' is very poorly defined. Some research has shown that some experts are so close to the subject matter at hand that they can form biases and may...