INFER is pleased to announce a collaboration with Cosmic Bazaar, the crowdsourced forecasting program run by the UK’s Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment (PHIA). Both programs, which represent the largest running forecasting efforts to support the U.S. government and British government, respectively, will synthesize and compare forecasting outputs on an identical set of questions focusing on critical science and technology topics. 

Cosmic Bazaar was created by the British government to improve the rigor of its intelligence analysis. It  involves 2,000 forecasters from 41 government departments and several allied countries and has been featured in The Economist.

The goal of the collaboration is to leverage the unique perspectives of our collective forecaster pool from inside and outside the intelligence community – and to expand the diversity of insights to strengthen intelligence and policy decisions.

Over the coming months, the same set of forecast questions will be posted separately on INFER and Cosmic Bazaar on topics such as biofuels, artificial intelligence, and the future of the internet. Forecasters will be asked to provide probabilistic assessments and rationales on their respective sites. INFER and Cosmic Bazaar will be working together to monitor the outputs of those questions and assess the forecasting trends, consensus/disagreements, and early warnings uncovered collectively.

"This collaboration allows us to amplify the positive impact that our respective platforms have had - and continue to have - on policy and decision-making processes, enabling crowd forecasting to serve as a powerful mechanism for ensuring that all signals get to the right decision-makers,” said INFER’s Adam Russell, Research Scientist at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS).

“We look forward to following the results of INFER closely to learn from their community and together advance how this unique forecasting approach can be used to support analysis across a range of science and technology areas,” said a Cosmic Bazaar representative.

INFER has designated a special topic for the questions that are part of this collaboration. To make forecasts, visit: INFER x Cosmic Bazaar Collaboration.