Company History

1988

A group of researchers headed by Dr. Doug Bond began an applied research project at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs to track the diffusion of popular protest actions throughout the world as reported in global news reports. Initially the team conducted the global survey manually.

1992

Beginning in 1992, the Harvard researchers joined with scholars at the University of Kansas to use their automated tool for coding the news reports. Meanwhile, the Harvard team developed a protocol to guide and inform the Kansas sparse parser and optimize it to identify protest events, both violent and otherwise. This Harvard protocol was dubbed PANDA (Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action). Its strength was its ability to illuminate the contours and potential flash points of conflicts as they evolve over time, but before they escalated into violence.

1996

Virtual Research Associates, Inc. was established in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with the mission of making the social, political, cultural, economic and civil costs of conflict transparent. VRA began to develop advanced software tools with the aim of processing the increasing volume of global reports with more precision and extensibility than the earlier sparse parsing tools offered. The VRAâ Reader, with its patent pending, natural language frame parsing technology, evolved from this software development effort, and it has now been used for more than five years to monitor global social, political and economic events in near real-time.

1997

VRA signs on SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) as its first customer. VRA delivers customized events data for a modeling project that exceeded the capabilities of human (manual) coding.

1998

Concurrent with its software development, VRA partnered with several University-based research teams to develop a more generic protocol to succeed the original PANDA framework. The second-generation protocol, called IDEA (Integrated Data for Events Analysis), was designed specifically to work with the VRAâ Reader. The IDEA protocol expands the PANDA protocol into a more generic framework or ontology suitable for use in monitoring events in the social, economic and political sectors. The IDEA protocol is in the public domain and is designed to be flexible, extensible and backwards compatible with the major events data frameworks most commonly used in the academic and risk analytics communities.

1999

Based on an assessment of actual archived field incident reports, VRA develops a web-based reporting system to report and manage security incidents from UNICEF field offices. The system is later customized and field tested in Colombia and Haiti.

2000

VRA develops and deploys a field reporting module for the Swiss Peace Foundation (SPF) for use in monitoring country stability in Central and South Asia. The SPF Field Reporter has been operating continuously since 2000. 

2001

VRA further customizes its software to facilitate commercial financial services usage. Statistical measures such as Moving Averages, MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) and Bollinger Bands are added to the Knowledge Manager Visualizer.

2002

The Harvard-MIT Virtual Data Center begins to distribute certain historical events data developed by VRA for non-commercial research and teaching use by scholars. VRA launches the VRAâ NEWS service – Noteworthy Early Warning Signals. The VRA Knowledge Manager is currently operating on a weekly production schedule of parsing approximately 80,000 Reuters’ global news reports per month.