Her “Code Red for the Web” for the Oct. 2001 Scientific American, reprinted in Best American Science Writing 2002.
In Hoaxers, Hackers, and Policymakers, Meinel documents how hoaxers fooled the FBI.
“For Love of a Gun,” electromagnetic guns, IEEE Spectrum, July, 2007.
What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?
Forecasting activities:
- # 1 upvotes, #10 accuracy, 2024 forecasting season, RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI).
- Third highest ranked forecaster, 2023 at INFER (predecessor to RFI)
- Sixth highest ranked forecaster, 2022 at INFER
- Third highest ranked forecaster of geopolitical questions at RFI/INFER (2022-present).
- Top Ten best COVID-19 forecasts, GJP 2.0 competition
- Second best (#1 in the control group) 2020 Human Forest vs. Random Forest in Time-Sensitive Clinical Trial Prediction experiment.
Jan. 2024 – present: President, BestWorld
March 4, 2024 – June 2024: AI Alignment Course, in part with the objective of comparing it with the structure and content of the ongoing Existential Risks Persuasion Tournament.
2022 – 2024t: Pro Forecaster with the RAND Forecasting Initiative (previously INFER (INtegrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk), which uses crowdsourced forecasting to generate early warnings and signals about the complex future that policy and decision makers within the US and allies must act upon.
Dec. 2016 – 2024t: Participant in multiple research projects on crowdsourced detection of replicability of research papers, most recently with RepliCATS, and beginning with the experiment that led to “Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.” In a 2024 RepliCATS experiment, forecasted replicability of draft social sciences papers, served as a team moderator.
2022 – present: Participant in the ongoing Existential Risks Persuasion Tournament. See the interim report here. Some aspects not in the interim report here.
2016 – Jan. 2024: Chief Technology Officer, Institute for Strategic and Innovative Technologies
March – July, 2020: Participant, IARPA’s GJP 2.0 competition. Our crowdsourced forecasting team overall was more accurate than the big models run by epidemiologists. Within this team, Meinel was ranked among the Top Ten best COVID-19 forecasts,
2019-2021: Served on IARPA’s winning FOCUS team of the University of Pennsylvania, forecasting outcomes of bots fighting bots created by John Hopkins APL.
2016-2020: Beta tester of the large language model Semantic Studio, including using it as one of the inputs to Meinel’s coauthored paper “What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters?”
2019 – 2020 : Served on the fourth place winning team (out of 37) with IARPA’s Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge II. This provided data from ~500 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers forecasting 304 questions. Meinel’s team used that data as evaluated by forty models of the team’s creation, and, later, other models plus additional data from the Good Judgment Project as inputs to the paper cited above, “What do forecasting rationales reveal...”
2018: Served on the Johns Hopkins APL T&E team with IARPA’s CREATE program.
2008 – 2009: Consultant to 8 RIVERS. Its founder, Miles Palmer, is also chairman of the board of BestWorld.
2005 – 2006:. Santa Fe Institute, Adaptive and Resilient Computing Workshops.
1998 – 2006: Process-based security distribution of Linux: Systems Advisory Group Enterprises, Inc. (SAGE, Inc.) Product tester/advisor for BRICKServer II Linux-based operating system. Discovered security flaws which have never been publicly disclosed (“0-day” exploits). Assisted in development of new products. A patent was issued to Vincent Larsen (President of SAGE, Inc.) and Meinel for “System & method of table building for a process-based security system using intrusion detection Publication number: 20050044381x.
Aug. 13 – 14, 2002: Cyberadversary Workshop, DARPA Information Awareness Office. Presented “Evolution of the Hacker Armies.”
1998 – 1999:.DARPA’s Off-line Intrusion Detection Program. Provided the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory with exploits against Windows NT systems for testing against intrusion detection systems,
1994 – 1995. Adjunct Professor at The University of New Mexico, Anderson School of Management,
1995 – 1996 Consultant to the Computational Sciences Division of the Utah State University Space Dynamics Laboratory, 1995-1996.
Barrage long range guided artillery project headed by Miles Palmer at: SAIC
1995: Advanced composites for racing cars in collaboration with Miles Palmer on behalf of VP Racing Fuels.
1988 – 1995: Consulting on many high technology ventures in collaboration with the Center for the New West and several venture capital entities.
1992 – 1993: Double Eagle particle beam lunar science probe study, including the Double Eagle/Lunar Scout meeting, Johnson Space Center, Dec. 7, 1992 and Technical Interchange Meeting, Department of Planetary Sciences, The University of Arizona, Dec. 21, 1992.
1984 – 1998 DARPA Tactical Technology Office SETA on hypervelocity impact and electromagnetic propulsion including for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization.
1983 – 1986. DARPA Strategic Technology Office SETA for the Rapid Optics Fabrication Technology program, Impactor Technology Program, programmed a module on satellite surveillance for a Navy wargame, modeled many other proposed satellite surveillance systems, Assisted bringing DARPA/STO into the SpaceWatch program by funding repurposing a Kit Peak Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope combined with DARPA’s first ever 2 dimensional CCD detector for what became today’s Asteroid Watch.
Meinel also has authored or co-authored many technical books on computers, aerospace and other high technology topics, numerous research papers in refereed journals, and over 200 magazine articles. See her long resume for examples – ->
EDUCATION: M.S., Industrial Engineering, The University of Arizona, 1983. Research in the mathematics of computation (traveling salesman heuristics). This topic is directly relevant to cryptography. B.A., General Studies, The University of Arizona, 1981. Three part major: math, systems engineering and creative writing. Short course on computer security, University of Texas,
PROFESSIONAL: Meinel is a life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was a co-founder and for several years president of the L-5 Society, an organization now known as the National Space Society.
Long resume here (lots and lots of papers, prepare to be bored —>)
© 2025 Carolyn Meinel. All rights reserved.