Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) systems aim to: Identify the causes of a conflict, anticipate their outbreak, and mitigate their impact. The EWRS are mechanisms for preventing and addressing conflicts that focus on the systematic collection, processing and analysis of information (quantitative or qualitative) about conflict situations for the purpose of warning decision-makers so that they can take measures or implement actions that will avoid the emergence or escalation of conflict. Modern technology enables us to predict the potential conflict events the world shall see in the future, it can also single out specific regions and countries for special attention. This allow organizations to perform early warning risk assessments for better planning and to target non-conflict interventions potentially limiting the break out or spread of conflict.
DARPA launched in 2017, the World Modelers program, with a aim to develop technology that will enable analysts to rapidly build models to analyze questions relevant to national and global security. Questions for analysis will typically be framed at subnational scales and look one to five years into the future, although the factors that influence outcomes of interest might operate on larger spatial and temporal scales.
Scientists and analysts, whether they are from the intelligence community or non-governmental organisations, typically convene a panel of domain experts across a variety of different fields, such as agriculture, regional security, and economics and markets, to gather the appropriate data sets and models and run them, Elliot said.
“Two years later after starting this project they will release a report explaining exactly what happened, what caused the famine, and what interventions could prevent it. But of course, by that point it has been two years and the issue is already well past,” he said. The hope is that the analysis will help inform decision makers when the next event arises but because these are relatively rare events, it could be a decade before the next one happens and by then a report could be long forgotten or no longer valid.
The purpose of the World Modelers program is to develop technology that will enable analysts to rapidly build models to analyze questions relevant to national and global security. Questions for analysis will typically be framed at subnational scales and look one to five years into the future, although the factors that influence outcomes of interest might operate on larger spatial and temporal scales. The predictive type models will enable different scenarios to be analysed as well as analysis of various intervention strategies.
World Modelers aims to enable a single analyst to conduct in about a month work that had previously taken two years to do. That analyst would identify complex sets and interventions that could solve or reduce the impact of a crisis while it is emerging.
The goal of DARPA’s World Modelers effort is to reduce the amount of time it takes to examine an issue, analyse it, come up with solutions and responses, and then write a report, Joshua Elliot, programme director for DARPA’s World Modelers, told Jane’s .
World Modelers analyses are intended to be timely enough to recommend specific actions that could avert crises. The program seeks to develop technologies that will provide clearly parameterized, quantitative projections within weeks or even hours of processing, compared to the months or years it takes today to understand considerably simpler systems.
World Modelers technologies will be applied to increasingly varied use cases as they mature through the phases of the program. Questions for analysis will typically be framed at subnational scales and look one to five years into the future, although the factors that influence outcomes of interest might operate on larger spatial and temporal scales. This subnational focus reflects the changing nature of conflict and security, which, increasingly, plays out in cities and districts. The first use case of World Modelers is food insecurity resulting from the interactions of multiple factors, including climate, water availability, soil viability, market instability, and physical security.
The goal of the World Modelers Program is to construct technology that allows the rapid building of models to address questions pertaining to both national and global security. The program will focus on food insecurity as an initial test case in phase 1 with the aim to build models that can predict future food insecurity in specific geographic locations
Food insecurity is a growing problem in many parts of the world where societies struggle to feed growing populations. Food insecurity has both humanitarian challenges and regional security ramifications, as food shortages can result in migration/displacement and conflict between peoples. Food insecurity will be the initial use case for the World Modelers program, and World Modelers technologies will enable researchers to efficiently and rigorously perform analytic tasks such as “Analyze food insecurity in each district of South Sudan two years into the future.” World Modelers technologies will be applied to additional (and increasingly varied) use cases as they mature through a sequence of program phases.
Large organizations have spent years perfecting analytical methods that do some of the above. World Modelers technology is expected to build models to solve this problem – and many others like it – in a month.
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