EMBERS is an anticipatory intelligence system forecasting population-level events in multiple countries of Latin America. A deployed system from 2012, EMBERS has been generating alerts 24x7 by ingesting a broad range of data sources including news, blogs, tweets, machine coded events,currency rates, and food prices. In this paper, we describe our experiences operating EMBERS continuously for nearly 4 years, with specific attention to the discoveries it has enabled, correct as well as missed forecasts, lessons learnt from participating in a forecasting tournament, and our perspectives on the limits of forecasting including ethical considerations.

Developed under the IARPA Open Source Initiative program, EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) is a large-scale Big-Data analytics system for forecasting significant societal events, such as civil unrest incidents and disease outbreaks on the basis of continuous, automated analysis of large volumes of publicly available data. It has been operational since November of 2012, delivering approximately 50 predictions each day. EMBERS is built on a streaming, scalable, share-nothing architecture and is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Feb 2014 violent protests in Venezuela. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

Automatic derivation of logical document structure from generic layout would enable the development of many highly flexible electronic document manipulation tools. This problem can be divided into the segmentation of text into pieces and the classification of these pieces as particular logical structures. This paper proposes an approach to the classification of logical document structures, according to their distance from predefined prototypes. The prototypes consider linguistic information minimally, thus relying minimally on the accuracy of OCR and decreasing language-dependence. Different classes of logical structures and the differences in the requisite information for classifying them are discussed. A prototype format is proposed, existing prototypes and a distance measurement are described, and performance results are provided.