Ozzie is a research scholar at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, working on forecasting and decision making technologies. He is also the founder of Guesstimate, a spreadsheet for things that aren't certain. Ozzie will talk to us about “An Outline of the Future of Judgmental Forecasting Services”.

The last few decades have seen a fair bit of theoretical research around applying judgemental forecasting methods for the purposes of organisation and governmental decision making. Prediction Markets, Decision Markets, Futarchy, and similar systems have been proposed and outlined. There has also been several prominent experiments in using judgemental forecasting on narrow domains, most prominently being the work by the Good Judgement Project. Yet despite this progress, there has been relatively little actual use of structured judgemental forecasting systems in the wild.

In this forum, Ozzie will outline possible approaches for building judgemental forecasting services that may be economically viable. This is done by breaking them down into a list of necessary subcomponents and investigating the limitations and requirements of each. For example, good ontology design and question operationalisation are crucial for forecasting value but are rarely studied in the current judgemental forecasting literature. This work draws inspiration and parallels from disciplines such as Operations Research and Reliability Engineering. In addition, Ozzie will discuss how experimentation using new judgemental forecasting software can be used to test and improve these ideas.