PILOT

PILOT is an extension and modernization of CAMEO.CAMEO was a landmark achievement. When Schrodt, Gerner, and their collaborators released the first working version in the early 2000s, they gave the quantitative international relations community something it had lacked: a systematic, scalable, and openly documented ontology for machine-coded event data that went well beyond the aging WEIS and COPDAB frameworks. CAMEO powered the DARPA-funded ICEWS project, shaped a generation of conflict forecasting models, and became the de facto standard for automated event coding in political science. But CAMEO was built for a different world. Its architecture reflected a Westphalian state-centric view of international politics, its event categories were developed primarily for the post-Cold War regional conflicts of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and its original ontology has no native vocabulary for cyber operations, space competition, information warfare, or the layered gray zone tactics that define great-power competition today. Keeping CAMEO as the canonical framework for event data research in 2025 is analogous to navigating a modern city with a map drawn before the internet existed. PILOT is the CSS-LUCAS’ answer to that challenge. We designed PILOT around a simple organizing principle: the Instruments of National Power (DIME/PMESII and its extensions), updated to reflect the full spectrum of competitive tools available to contemporary state and non-state actors. Rather than starting from verb phrases and inducing categories, PILOT starts from a theory of statecraft and derives the event taxonomy from it.