This, from Wired.com's Danger Room:
The U.S intelligence community has a long history of blowing big calls — the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saddam’s WMD, 9/11. But in each collective fail, there were individual analysts who got it right. Now, the spy agencies want a better way to sort the accurate from the unsound, by applying principles of mathematics to weigh and rank the input of different experts.

Iarpa, the intelligence community’s way-out research arm, will host a one-day workshop on a new program, called Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE). The initiative follows Iarpa’s recent announcement of plans to create a computational model that can enhance human hypotheses and predictions, by catching inevitable biases and accounting for selective memory and stress.

ACE won’t replace flesh-and-blood experts — it’ll just let ‘em know what they’re worth. The intelligence community often relies on small teams of experts to evaluate situations, and then make forecasts and recommendations. But a team is only as strong as its weakest link, and Iarpa wants to fortify team-based outputs, by using mathematical aggregation to “elicit, weigh, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts" ....