SciCast was an outgrowth of an earlier project called DAGGRE (Decomposition-Based Elicitation and Aggregation), also an IARPA project that implemented GMU economist Robin Hanson's idea of combinatorial prediction tech markets, and was a participant in the IARPA Aggregative Contingent Estimation tournament [REF].
The launch of SciCast itself was announced by Robin Hanson on January 3, 2014,[REF] and the official announcements were made on January 10, 2014 [REF].