University of Kwazulu-Natal

2024 End Of Year Retrospective Cultivate Labs Blog

Bonisiwe Shabane
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2024 end of year retrospective cultivate labs blog

Before we close shop and take a few days off, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the challenges, milestones, and relevant events that defined the year for our company + a... So let’s take a step back and reflect on what made this year what it was. Our business model provides a hosted or on-premise forecasting platform to enable organizations to run their own crowdsourced forecasting efforts internally and externally. Alongside that technology we offer consulting services to make sure the use of our platform is optimized in whatever scenario it is being used, both technologically and most importantly, as part of decision making... I want to highlight 6 of our projects that I felt made a particular impact this year (and that I can publicly discuss!) Having its lineage in CSET’s Foretell, the RAND Corporation transitioned the University of Maryland’s ARLIS INFER program to create a new offering for government stakeholders in the U.S.

and abroad. After a competitive bidding process, Cultivate was chosen to support RAND in their efforts. The ultimate impact of that work will be over the course of years, but RAND brings a unique ability to bring RFI forecasts to a massive portfolio of their own projects which will flow... Already this year several projects have launched questions and leveraged results in their deliverables, and plans are to scale this massively in 2025. Here is a year-end review on the RFI blog if you’d like to learn more. And you can make an impact too by signing up to forecast.

Launched in 2022, Cultivate runs a forecasting effort for Fox News called “America Predicts.” Amassing tens of thousands of forecasts each week from now well over a million people, Fox News editors place an... Readers use a custom “needle” interface to set a probability, and can also provide a rationale for their forecast. I don’t know the traffic at Kalshi, Polymarket, and other large public prediction sites, but I think it’s safe to say this is one of the largest efforts to expose the task of probabilistic... A roundup of all currently running questions across Fox News articles can be seen here: foxnews.com/americapredicts The Alliance for Decision Education’s Forecasting the Future Forecasting Tournaments I wrote a year end retrospective for Cultivate Labs.

I talk about the impact we had with some of our projects, what we're going to be working on in the coming year, and some personal musings about the predictable prediction market bubble during... election cycle, and the importance of supporting mental health as part of company culture. https://lnkd.in/gMZ93Gjj Tldr; - Hopefully, but it won’t be because of superhuman accuracy.AI forecasting systems are the talk of the forecasting world. AI forecasting tournaments are running, VC money is flowing, and benchmarks are being published. We’re building an AI forecasting system ourselves.

As with the rest of crowdsourced forecasting’s history, most of the chatter is around accuracy. How accurate are the LLMs? When will they beat human and pro forecasters? Can you train models specifically for forecas When geopolitical analysts wrestle with a complex geopolitical question, say the future of European financial support to Ukraine, they tend to begin with familiar sources: Western media, think tank reports, and official statements. But what if using AI they ran the same scenario-building exercise with Russian sources threaded in?

The same Russian sources a Russian analyst might leverage as part of their own analysis? What might change in the narratives, framing, and assessed likelihoods? A forecasting workshop on lunar diplomacy, co-facilitated by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the European Space Policy Institute, explored how national interests, private investment, and international competition will define future activity on the Moon. Participants identified signposts and used crowdsourced forecasting to track three plausible scenarios: rival lunar coalitions, China cislunar primacy, and a pluralistic lunar order. Recent disputes over Iran’s nuclear ambitions highlight the power of a now defunct internal U.S. intelligence forecasting capability, the Intelligence Community Prediction Market (ICPM).

Last month I had the opportunity to travel to Kyiv for some work we’re doing there. Since not many people are traveling to Kyiv these days from the US, I thought I would share a few reflections on my visit. 🎯 What a year it has been! Our end-of-year newsletter just dropped, featuring a retrospective from our CEO Adam Siegel on Cultivate's key activities and achievements in 2024. 🚀 We're especially excited to share something we've been working on: our new Analyst Research Companion (ARC) tool. It's a blend of human insight and #AI capabilities that helps #researchers explore future scenarios, understand market and #geopolitical drivers, and catch analytical blind spots we all sometimes miss.

Read our full update and try ARC here: https://lnkd.in/gKVAGgS9 Public bodies have been dealing with outdated systems for years. While familiar, they are becoming increasingly unfit for purpose. As expectations rise and caseloads grow more complex, the cracks in legacy tools are getting harder to ignore. So, what actually makes a great case management system? In our latest article, we explore the traits that separate the good from the game-changing and how CloudSource is helping public bodies move from fragmented to future-ready.

If you’re rethinking your approach to case management, this is a must-read. https://lnkd.in/gkjdaTPK #PublicSector #CaseManagement #Registrations #Casework #Complaints #FitnesstoPractice #Hearings #Investigations #DigitalTransformation #Innovation #AI #PublicServices Last week, in the latest Quantabyte from our Quantitative Investments team. they explored why combining models tends to improve predictive accuracy. Now, they move from theory to practice—covering how to build ensembles, what kinds of diversity matter, and how methods like Bagging, Boosting, and Stacking compare. They dive deeper into real-world applications in financial forecasting, from academic research to live industry use.

Discover how ensembles make financial predictions more robust 👉 https://okt.to/TioYVh #Vontbel #AI #QuantitativeInvestments My teammates in the Quantitative Investments group explore the intricacies of creating ensembles, the significance of various types of diversity, and the comparisons between approaches such as Bagging, Boosting, and Stacking. Discover how ensembles enhance the reliability of financial predictions in the details below 👇 Last week, in the latest Quantabyte from our Quantitative Investments team. they explored why combining models tends to improve predictive accuracy. Now, they move from theory to practice—covering how to build ensembles, what kinds of diversity matter, and how methods like Bagging, Boosting, and Stacking compare.

They dive deeper into real-world applications in financial forecasting, from academic research to live industry use. Discover how ensembles make financial predictions more robust 👉 https://okt.to/TioYVh #Vontbel #AI #QuantitativeInvestments Use crowdsourcing to learn what your people really think is going to happen with your most important milestones and risks. My latest blog post from the Cultivate Labs, Inc blog, spelling out why the obsession with forecasting accuracy risks ignoring the bigger challenges - https://lnkd.in/de4TP3Hx Red teaming is essential for making better, bias-resistant decisions. That’s why we built it into ARC as a core technique, so you get rigorous, adversarial analysis at AI speed.

New article explores how ARC’s red teaming helps you challenge assumptions and deliver stronger insights. How do top analysts and decision-makers avoid costly blind spots? ARC has made professional-grade red teaming accessible to everyone—using AI to rigorously challenge assumptions, surface hidden risks, and make your analysis bulletproof, fast. Our latest article shows how ARC’s red teaming feature uncovers cognitive bias, pressure-tests your scenarios, and helps you deliver resilient, actionable insights. 👉 Full article: https://lnkd.in/eAv4N5JG How is red teaming changing your analysis - what have you uncovered? #RedTeaming #AIAnalytics #ARCplatform

Founder & CEO, PipelineClarity | R&D pipeline strategy 📢 Exciting new project: Pipeline Signal 🧬💊 🎟️ You're invited to predict the probability of success - with the crowd! We're launching a new project that brings collective intelligence to biopharma. We'll predict the probability of success in drug development pipelines: 🏥 Clinical trial outcomes 👩⚖️ Regulatory decisions Can we leverage the wisdom of the crowds to make predictions accurately? Who is best at predicting the probability of success in biopharma R&D? 👩🦳 Individuals?

🧔♂️👩🦱👩 Teams? (Or the crowd at large?) 🤖 Algorithms, AI? 🐒🎯 Can humans even beat a dart-throwing chimp? (Already invited.) Join the project and help us find out! 👇 SIGN UP HERE 👇 https://lnkd.in/dEeMPUce New prediction questions will be released with regular cadence. We are happy to take suggestions for additional prediction questions!

💡 The project runs on the state-of-the-art prediction platform from Cultivate Labs, Inc. - Thanks to CEO Adam Siegel & team for collaborating with us on this project. 🤔 Who is behind Pipeline Signal? Simon Birksø Larsen & David Hartley #Prediction #Forecasting #ProbabilityOfSuccess #Biopharma With the unprecedented uncertainty of global politics, the markets, and social change, how do you make sense of it all? ARC is built to mimic and enhance what highly trained analysts do: use analytic techniques like scenario planning, decomposition, and red teaming to transform the rigor and speed of how you make critical decisions.

Tap the collective intelligence of your community to generate new insights, reduce risk, and gain competitive advantage. Simplify the process of quantifying and analyzing human perspectives about the future with your employees, partners, or the public, to make better decisions and challenge conventional thinking. Available as self-hosted or cloud-based solution. CEO Adam Siegel introduces a new service offering “issue decomposition” workshops - a new way of methodically understanding how the future will impact your most important decisions and policies. How the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy paired issue decomposition with crowdsourced forecasting to understand the future impact of a national security issue and craft better policy. As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to pause and reflect on the projects that have shaped our year.

Whether they were groundbreaking successes or humbling lessons learned, each one has contributed to our growth and development. Different types of teams, from agile squads to traditional departments, can benefit from this reflective practice. In this post, we’ll dive into the importance of end-of-year retrospectives and how they can help us set the stage for even better projects in the new year. By looking back, we can find out what worked, what didn’t, and what we can do differently to make our future projects better, more efficient, and fun. So, grab a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and let’s explore how to make the most of this reflective process. Retrospectives, also known as retros, are a valuable tool for teams to reflect on their past experiences, identify areas for improvement, and generate ideas for growth.

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