Korkmaz Coauthors Paper Recognized with Test of Time Award, 2025 ACM SIGKDD

Gizem Korkmaz, PhD, Vice President of Data Science and AI at Westat, is a coauthor of a paper that received the 2025 Test of Time Award – Applied Data Science from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD). The notable paper, titled “‘Beating the News’ with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest Using Open Source Indicators” (PDF), was recognized for spotlighting the groundbreaking 2014 research about how open-source data can be used to predict civil unrest—findings that have remained relevant and valuable long after publication.

Each year, SIGKDD presents Test of Time Awards for articles on research and applied data science that have had the greatest impact since their original publication. SIGKDD is the world’s leading professional community for data mining, data science, and analytics.

The original research article discussed the EMBERS system, a continuously operating, automated platform designed to forecast civil unrest in 10 Latin American countries using open-source data, such as social media, news, and economic indicators. Unlike retrospective models, EMBERS has been issuing real-time forecasts since November 2012.

“When EMBERS was built, the goal was to push the boundaries of predictive analytics for societal events. It was a multidisciplinary collaboration that brought together social and political scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, economists, and data scientists. We worked with vast amounts of unstructured—particularly millions of social media posts—and applied machine learning models and natural language processing methods well before today’s wave of AI hype. Over a decade later, the system’s real-time forecasts continue to inform the science of early warning. This recognition highlights the power and impact of multidisciplinary work—something I’ve been passionate about ever since,” said Korkmaz.