Can AI spot countries at risk of a sudden change in leadership?
What’s new: Researchers at the University of Central Florida are working with a system called CoupCast to estimate the likelihood that an individual country will undergo a coup d’état, The Washington Post reported.
Why it matters: Technology that helps people see what’s on the horizon may help prevent coups from spiraling into civil wars and humanitarian crises — or at least help people prepare for the worst.
We’re thinking: Modeling political unrest is an important but challenging small-data problem; CoupCast’s dataset included only 600 positive examples. Given the extremely high stakes of international relations, a data-driven approach seems like a productive complement to human analysis.