OREANDA-NEWS. July 17, 2015. Lockheed Martin’s [NYSE: LMT] Advanced Technology Laboratories recently gave key information about world events that took place over the last 20 years to the Harvard Dataverse Network to help researchers analyze social unrest and political instability around the world.

The digitized and coded world history includes 15 million unique events extracted from 23 million news stories published between March 1995 and March 2014.

“While nobody has a crystal ball, researchers can use the power of data analytics to help forecast unrest in the future,” said Mark Hoffman, Lockheed Martin program manager. “Now the broader academic community can help anticipate the next Arab Spring uprisings or mass protests. We’ve spent years ingesting and digesting news reports to help the government prepare for and respond to instability, and we want the world to benefit from that analysis.”

Lockheed Martin researchers have been capturing and coding the data since 2007 as part of the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), which is used by the Department of Defense, intelligence community and other federal agencies. The ICEWS team also includes Raytheon BBN Technologies, Duke University, Lustick Consulting, and Strategic Analysis Enterprises, Inc.

Making the dataset available on the Harvard Dataverse will support modeling, forecasting and longitudinal studies to evaluate the behaviors of individuals, groups and nations over time – allowing researchers to draw correlations among past events to help forecast future events.

The Harvard Dataverse Network is an open-source application for sharing, citing, analyzing and preserving research data. It includes the world's largest collection of social science research data and is maintained by Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences.

Development of the ICEWS data released through the Harvard Dataverse was funded under government contract with the Office of Naval Research.

For additional information, visit our website: http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/W-ICEWS.html

About Lockheed Martin

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 112,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The Corporation’s net sales for 2014 were \\$45.6 billion.