.: In The News
Feb. 16, 2023 ISIT's Dawna Coutant (AKA DKC) and Carolyn Meinel have expanded their successes suporting the intelligence efforts of the U.S. and its allies, now including collaboration with the U.K.'s Cosmic Bazaar, the crowdsourced forecasting program run by the UK’s Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment (PHIA). Cosmic Bazaar was created by the British government to improve the rigor of its intelligence analysis. It involves 2,000 forecasters from 41 government departments and several allied countries and has been featured in The Economist."
Feb. 21, 2023 "INFER's Best of 2022: Congratulations to the season's leaders across various forecasting categories." Yes, both Dawna Coutant (user name DKC) and Carolyn Merinel are among the best of the best with this geopolitical forecasting challenge.
Feb. 8, 2023 INFER released its list of top geopolitical forecasters for the 2022 season. Unsurprisingly, ISIT's Dawna Coutant (user name DKC) and Carolyn Meinel made it into the top five for many categories. For accuracy, Dawna was #7 and Carolyn #54 out of 1091 competitors, of whom over 100 were fellow Pro Forecasters.
INFER, short for INtegrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk,"is a forecasting program designed to generate valuable signals and early warning about the future of critical science and technology trends and high-risk geopolitical events for U.S. Government policymakers"
Oct. 2021: ISIT's involvement in IARPA's IARPA's Hybrid Forecasting Competition finally paid off. Although we didn't win a contract, we went ahead and did the research anyhow. See " What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?" in the International Journal of Forecasting.
August 2021: ISIT's Dawna Coutant and Carolyn Meinel had been combating COVID-19 as participants in IARPA's GJP 2.0 program. We did better than the big modeling teams for the first six months of the pandemic. Then we were about even with the models until Delta arrived. Wow, what a surprise this was to most of us. See what we had forecasted for 2021 as of August 8, 2020 at Covid_forecasts_2021.html
May 2020: ISIT's Carolyn Meinel explains how she used Natural Language Processing to forecast geopolitical questions in a webinar hosted by Basis Technology: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall -- which Country Will Rule them All?
January 2020: The team of ISIT and KaDSci, LLC came in 4th place in IARPA's Geopolitical Forecasting Competition out of over 100 initial competitors by forecasting 305 questions within just 5 1/2 months: Details here.
The 18th International Electromagnetic Launch (EML) Technology Symposium was held in Wuhan, China during October 24-28, 2016.
ISIT has been researching a powerful new technology called Plasma Gasification. It's a process that converts carbon (organic) materials such as municipal and other wastes, coal, and petroleum into synthesis gas (syngas), under very controlled conditions of heat and oxygen.
There are two primary products: one is SYNGAS, composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can be used as a fuel to generate electricity or it can be used as a basic chemical building block in the production of high value energy products such as diesel fuel. Depending on the feed stock, the other is molten glass (also metal) that can be used in construction or building materials.
Plasma gasification is NOT combustion and in fact, is very different from combustion or incineration. The chemical reactions in the plasma gasification process converts waste or other materials into simple molecules and atoms, whereas incineration creates complex and toxic substances, including dioxins and furans.
.: Plasma Gasification
WHY Plasma for Waste to Energy Solutions?
Energy sources which are not harmful to the environment and atmospheric pollution are two of the worlds’ most critical global challenges.
• High temperatures provide different chemistries and chemical kinetics
• Produce higher quality SYNGAS
• Better environmental performance
• Enable efficient processing of wide range of feed stocks (wood, plastic, MSW, medical waste, chemicals, etc)
• Operate efficiently at smaller scale than alternative approaches
• Can be configured for efficient energy production, or production of transport fuels, or chemical feedstocks
• Solid residues are non-leaching vitreous – NOT ASH
This Goal is Not New.
Economic Waste to Energy Conversion Requires Efficient Heat Sources
For years, plasma scientists have attempted to commercialize direct current plasma generators for convertIng waste to energy.
Plasma waste to energy gasification facilities have been built in Europe and Asia, where land filling is very limited or even prohibited and energy has historically been more costly.
The critical limitation to successful implementation of these plasma gasification facilities, has been the lifetime of the plasma generators and the efficiency and associated economics of the gasification process. The first generation of torches were DC, now they are AC.
High Efficiency Alternating current Current Plasma Generators were developed by the Russians during the Cold War. This technology has been transitioned to the United States and ISIT.
