JPMorgan's crowdsourced data platform lives on

Remember ROAR data? Two years ago, it was quietly evolving as part of JPMorgan's project to develop "an online platform to host prediction competitions and challenges among public participants."

It apparently came to nothing, but the ROAR concept has not died.

Peter Cotton, the JPMorgan data scientist behind ROAR has been busy building a new crowdsourced data platform called Microprediction. 

Cotton didn't respond to a request to comment on the new platform, which began running competitions this summer. The idea appears to be a little like Kaggle (data scientists compete to write algorithms that make the best predictions) and a little like ROAR (people with data sets can plug them into the site for user to analyze).

In one existing datastream, users are invited to calculate the next move of a badminton player. In another, they're asked to predict the movement of a helicopter in a two-dimensional space.

Micropredictions are defined as, 'repeated, very short-term forecasts -- nowcasts -- using real-time data streams.'  Users publish data to the site and algorithms compete to optimize it. 

Cotton was an executive director at JPMorgan, where he worked in New York City for over six years. At JPM, ROAR had over 1,000 contributing data scientists from within the bank. Micropredictions seems to have taken over the ROAR domain and is a division of Intech Investments, where Cotton leads the data science team.

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