EMBERS

• Forecasting
• Network Science

| August 1, 2012 – July 4, 2016

EMBERS is a system for forecasting societal significant societal events from open source surrogates.

EMBERS is a fully automated 24×7 forecasting system for significant societal events using open source data including:

• tweets,
• Facebook pages,
• news articles, blog posts,
• Google search volume,
• Wikipedia,
• meteorological data,
• economic and financial indicators,
• coded event data,
• online restaurant reservations (Open Table),
• satellite imagery.

EMBERS is sponsored by a contract for over $22M from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Open Source Indicators (OSI) Program. Unlike retrospective studies of forecasting, EMBERS processes massive data streams into alerts of significant events which are emailed in real-time as they are generated.  EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since November 2012, which have been evaluated by an independent party. Key event classes studied in EMBERS include influenza-like illness (ILI) case counts, rare disease outbreaks, civil unrest, domestic political crises, and elections.

EMBERS generates 45-50 alerts per day across multiple countries of Latin America. In March 2014, EMBERS was named as the winner of the OSI forecasting tournament. Key events forecast by EMBERS since project inception include protests after the impeachment of Paraguay’s president (May 2012), the “Brazilian Spring” (June 2013), Hantavirus outbreaks in Argentina and Chile (2013), violent protests led by Venezuelan students (Feb 2014), and presidential elections in Panama and Columbia (2014).

EMBERS Team

The EMBERS effort is lead by DAC with a team of both internal and external partners. 

Internal VT departments:

• Computer Science
• Statistics
• Mechanical Engineering
• Biocomplexity Institute
• Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science at Virginia Tech

 External:

• University of Maryland,College Park
• University of California San Diego
• University of California Santa Cruz,
• University of Utah
• University at Albany-State University of New York
• Northeastern University
• Children’s Hospital Boston
• San Diego State University
• University of Michigan,
• the companies CACI Inc. and Basis Technology