The Project

The augurs of ancient Rome examined the flight of birds to interpret the will of the gods.  Nothing was trivial: the number of birds in flight, the sounds their wings made, the formation they assumed.  No great task was undertaken before first consulting these classical priests, who predicted its success or failure.

In cooperation with Lockheed Martin, Project Augur’s goal is to explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence as a predictive mechanism.  Through the use of crowd-sourcing through Amazon Mechanical Turk, and with a trio of gamelike prototypes that collect data, Augur aims to build artificial intelligence algorithms that can predict based not only on an individual’s past play, but other, less obvious factors as well.