Pentagon's Prediction Software Didn't Spot Egypt Unrest

In the last three years, America's military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest. It's the latest episode in Washington's four-decade dalliance with future-spotting programs. But if any of these algorithms saw the upheaval in Egypt coming, the spooks and the generals are keeping the predictions very quiet.

...
In the near term, Pentagon insiders say, the most promising forecasting effort comes out of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And even the results from this Darpa-funded Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) have been imperfect, at best. ICEWS modelers were able to forecast four of 16 rebellions, political upheavals and incidents of ethnic violence to the quarter in which they occurred. Nine of the 16 events were predicted within the year, according to a 2010 journal article [.pdf] from Sean O'Brien, ICEWS' program manager at Darpa.

Read more.