DND/CAF: IDEaS Prediction Contest
Fast Forward: Forecasting Global Emerging Threats
About the Challenge
In 2024, Canada’s Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF) launched the Fast Forward – Forecasting Global Emerging Threats prediction challenge through the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program. The challenge invited teams worldwide to use publicly available data, statistical methods, and machine learning to forecast future armed-conflict fatalities, paired with machine-generated explanations that make models more transparent.
VIEWS serves as a partner to the challenge, providing the compiled and harmonised training data used by participants and contributing technical expertise to the model evaluation phase of the challenge.
Awards for the Top-Three Teams
Based on the performance of their respective predictions, and the intuitive documentation of their final models, the top three teams will be awarded prizes of up to $150 000. Their contributions will also help advance the use of data-driven forecasting methods by Canada’s Defense Team: “The longer-term goal is to integrate these models into methods and tools aimed at helping the Canadian Defence Team intelligence analysts to perform data-driven forecasting tasks while addressing the challenges of trust and accountability for analysts leveraging these novel forms of anticipatory intelligence. The aim will be to compare and eventually adopt systems that can help analysts to rapidly organize and exploit data from publicly available and private sources” (canada.ca).
Objectives
Anticipate Emerging Conflict Risks
Produce forward-looking forecasts to identify where violent conflict may emerge globally up to three years in advance.
Advance Forecasting Methods
Enhance innovate methodological tools for global and subnational conflict prediction.
Inform Canadian Prevention Efforts
Support the Canadian government with accessible, policy-relevant forecasts to enable early, targeted responses to future threats.
Funders
This contest is funded and hosted by the Canadian Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF)