The idea behind tapping into collective intelligence is simple: There’s bits of useful information distributed among the members of diverse crowds, so aggregating their judgments should yield a better answer — better even than experts’ — to a particular question.
But ARA is looking to do something just a little different from other crowdsourcing efforts. While many similar tools assign equal weight to participants’ inputs, ACES will be looking for the most accurate predictors over time and weighting their judgments more heavily than other users.
Tools that tap into the smarts of the crowd have shown promise on a host of challenges over the years. Researchers have used Twitter buzz about upcoming movies to make pretty accurate predictions about box office sales on opening weekends. Tools like Ushaidi, nonprofit software that lets users map incidents, resources or people in the midst of crises, has helped rescuers find and save victims of disasters like Haiti’s earthquake.
ACES is a crowdsourcing tool somewhat similar to an online poll. People who sign up for the website will be asked whether an event in the fields of politics, economics, science, society or security will take place and what probability they assign to it. Their answers are then aggregated to see if the group produces an accurate prediction. It’s not a prediction market like the famous InTrade, which lets users bet on just about anything you can think of. No money changes hands on ACES — only opinions.
For ACES to be successful, it needs to attract a diverse pool of users and keep them engaged. But the online world is home to a lot of crowdsourcing tools and prediction markets, posing stiff competition for the marginal predictor’s attention. In addition to sites like InTrade, there’s a slew of other options available. The University of Iowa’s Iowa Electronic Market has been around since 1988 letting users bet on presidential elections or Federal Reserve Policy. Cinephiles use the Hollywood Stock Exchange website to bet on opening weekend box office hauls and other movie-related events.
Warnaar says he’s hoping some of ACES’s features designed to research analytical skills for the intelligence community will also prove interesting to the average user. “We’re thinking that people will be interested in competing with others and maybe learning how to become better forecasters.”
To accomplish that, ARA is working on a tool intended to help forecasters better calibrate their estimates of a prediction’s probability. For example, let’s say ACES finds out that when you say there’s a 60 percent chance an event will happen, it turns out that over time your “60 percent” guesses actually end up having a probability of closer to 40 percent. The site will then clue you in to your serial over or under-confidence, giving you feedback on your forecasting ability and allowing you to adjust accordingly.
Other features planned for the site would allow a social dimension to the prediction process. There’s some evidence that indicates information sharing among participants may undermine the accuracy of the crowd, turning a wise crowd into a dull mob. Warnaar says the jury is still out on the effect of social influence. “It’s not clear, for example, whether or not collaboration between participants helps or hurts.” Either way, he plans to find out, as ACES will experiment with features that lets users work together on prediction challenges.
Just like with math problems, ACE wants you to show your work after making a prediction. ARA has yet to determine how exactly participants can elaborate and collaborate on predictions. But some approaches could involve having users write about their rank their reasons behind it and let others vote on them.
“We think there’s a way of doing it this way that would basically give us the arguments for [a particular event] and split the problem apart in such a way that people start thinking about this problem a little deeper than they otherwise would,” says Warnaar.
Turning to the crowd has proven pretty popular with security types. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, recently began work on a prediction market aimed at forecasting computer security events. Darpa, the nerd cousin of Iarpa over at the Defense Department, tucked away some cash in its budget last year to farm intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data out to the crowd in search of better analysis. The Navy has even turned to crowdsourcing via online multiplayer games in order to hunt for better ideas against piracy.
So how would ACES be applied in the intelligence community? ARA’s press literature mentions National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) as an area of potential application. NIEs represent the top-level assessment of America’s various spook agencies and senior-most analysts on a particular topic. Right now, ACES is still in the research phase and any firm ideas on how or would just be speculative, but it’s not hard to imagine potential uses. A validated ACES tool that polls intelligence analysts could complement an NIE, letting intelligence consumers gain a more complete picture of the intelligence community’s views on an issue.
But that’s only possible if ACES turns out to be accurate, something that’s yet to be proven. It’ll be a long while before answers are forthcoming — the project won’t be completed for another four years.
Photo: Focus Features
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iSwifter, the company that can stream Flash-based Facebook games so they can be played on the iPad, said that users have downloaded the iSwifter app more than half a million times since the launch of version 3.0 in June and (updated) version 4.0 more recently.
That’s a strong start for a technology that circumvents Apple’s walled garden on the iPad, allowing Facebook and other Flash content to run properly on the tablet. Normally, Adobe Flash games (which are ubiquitous on the web) don’t run on Apple’s iPad, thanks to a technical dispute between the companies. But after a period of negotiation with Apple, iSwifter made it impossible possible with the launch of version 3.0 of its app, which comes with a subscription-based game browser.
iSwifter executes games on its own servers and then streams images to a user’s iPad in the form of a video. The execution is so quick, the user never knows the game is running in a server, not on the iPad itself.
Peter Relan, chairman of Youweb — the incubator that owns iSwifter — is making the announcement today at the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco. 500,000 people are playing nearly 2,000 Facebook games available on the iSwifter game browser. About 40 percent of all gaming time on iSwifter is spent on Zynga games. This shows that users are not waiting for Zynga and other Facebook game makers to adapt their games to run on the iPad.
That’s an interesting notion, Relan says, because the company charges a subscription fee for iSwifter. Zynga games, meanwhile, are free-to-play. That is, users play them for free and pay real money for virtual goods. But with iSwifter, Zynga players are actually willing to pay money so they can play Zynga games on the go on an iPad. About 20 percent of iSwifter users are willing to pay using in-app purchases to get access to a Facebook game on the iPad. And iSwifter users spent nearly 2 million minutes on Facebook games in the past few months (using earlier versions of iSwifter).
The most popular Facebook games on iSwifter are Zynga’s CityVille and Empires & Allies. Other top 10 games include FrontierVille, Dragons of Atlantis, Gardens of Tim, Backyard Monsters and SlotoMania.
iSwifter CEO Rajat Gupta said the company’s success shows that disruption is occurring in mobile games, where portals such as iSwifter, making it harder for social game publishers to lock their customers on certain platforms.
“While we hear the Facebook app for the iPad is coming soon, we know it won’t include the ability to play games,” said Gupta. “Almost all the big games on Facebook are built in Flash, which doesn’t run on iOS. But iSwifter has created a large following of paying users who love playing Facebook games on their iPads.”
With iSwifter’s game-browser app, iPad users can log into online games like World of Warcraft or play social games such as CityVille on their iPads, even though those games aren’t playable on Apple’s device in any other way.
Users can get the iSwifter app with a regular web browser that can play Flash videos and other web content on an iPad for a subscription of $4.99 a month a flat fee of $4.99 Both deliver Flash and game content — including any social games or massively multiplayer online games.
The first couple of versions of iSwifter let users to watch videos and play a limited number of Flash games on an iPad. But version 3.0 allows you to log into Facebook and play a variety of Flash-based games such as FarmVille, Gupta said in an interview.
Apple approved the previous versions of iSwifter without much interchange. But the 3.0 approval process was lengthier and tougher because iSwifter introduced a new monetization feature. Gupta said he wanted to launch a subscription service where a user would sign up once for iSwifter and the subscription would automatically renew at the end of each month. But Apple balked and required that iSwifter’s users approve the subscription at the end of every month. That way, users won’t get surprised by monthly bills. It isn’t exactly clear why Apple required this restriction for iSwifter, but Gupta said he had to go along. Now, to reduce confusion, iSwifter has eliminated the subscriptions in favor of a single download fee. With version 4.0, users can download it for free and play it for a half hour. If they like it, they can pay the flat fee.
When you load the app, you have two options. You can browse web sites or play games. With the web sites, you can choose from one of the featured links or just type in the web address to go to any web site. For games, there is one game that is available for free each week. The others are available as free-to-play games. After a couple of minutes of playing, the user is prompted to make an in-app purchase to continue playing. If there is a drawback to iSwifter, it is that it needs a constant Wi-Fi connection in order to run, as the video has to be streamed in near real-time to create a continuous and good experience for the user. Gupta says that the amount of bandwidth required to support the app isn’t huge.
Gupta says that iSwifter would be useful on Android systems as well, even though Flash is going to be available on those devices. That’s because all of the capabilities of Flash aren’t available on those devices. Right now, iSwifter runs on just the iPad.
It’s worth noting that many Flash web sites are written for PCs and need a mouse and keyboard. That means they won’t work well on a mobile device unless they are redone in a touchscreen-friendly way. But iSwifter has built software — an abstraction layer built into the cloud platform — that captures a user’s touch-based gestures and converts them into mouse and keyboard-style inputs that Flash games can understand. That conversion is done in real-time.
Developers who have free-to-play games may be particularly interested in making their games accessible via iSwifter 4.0. That’s because iSwifter can extend distribution for the web-based games to the Apple platform. If users buy virtual goods in those games, the developers can make money from the purchases. Apple still gets paid, meanwhile, because it gets 30 percent of the revenue from subscription fees generated by iSwifter, per Apple’s business rules.
The iSwifter browser competes with the Skyfire browser, which costs $4.99 on the iPad. But the Skyfire browser isn’t really built to handle games or Flash animations, particularly since it can’t convert finger touches into mouse clicks.
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