Next Century to Help IARPA Develop SIGINT-Based Event Forecasting Tool

Next Century has received a three-year contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop a signals intelligence-based tool that will work to forecast societal events as part of IARPA’s Mercury Program.

The SIGINT-based Anticipation of Future Events technology will be built to detect and predict terrorist or military activities, civil unrest and rare disease outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa, the software company said Wednesday.

“Anticipating events well before they occur would allow us to prevent or minimize loss of life,” noted John McBeth, Next Century president and CEO.

Next Century will lead a team of predictive analytics specialists from Thresher Ventures, the University of Southern California, Draper, Virginia Tech, Harvard University, Ward Associates, Northeastern University, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon to produce the SAFE platform.

IARPA’s Mercury program seeks methods to automate the analysis of foreign SIGINT data to predict significant  political, military and public health events.