Gothenburg, Sweden – On June 10th, during the 2025 edition of the annual DEMSCORE conference in Gothenburg, VIEWS researchers took center stage in a panel titled Uncertain Counts, Uncertain Futures: Innovations in Conflict Data Collection and Forecasting.
Chaired by Steven Wilson (Brandeis University), the session featured four expert presenters:
- Therese Pettersson (Research Coordinator, UCDP at Uppsala University; filling in for Mert Can Yilmaz) discussed the complexities of identifying civilians and combatant victims in organized violence.
- Håvard Hegre (Professor, VIEWS at Uppsala University & PRIO) focused on forecasting the intensity of armed conflict with uncertainty taken into account, and the importance of input data therein.
- Chandler Williams (Doctoral Researcher, PRIO; affiliated with VIEWS consortium) presented on nowcasting wartime fatalities to strengthen real-time conflict monitoring. Browse the slides.
- Mihai Croicu (Researcher, VIEWS at Uppsala University) shared advancements in deep active learning for extracting rich details from conflict text corpora.
The panel demonstrated how VIEWS research spans the full spectrum from foundational data classification to machine learning approaches for forecasting. By highlighting both conceptual and technical advances, it underscored the importance of UCDP’s and VIEWS’s work in shaping the future of conflict data collection and forecasting.
