Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Modeling Social Terrain

Advanced technologies are transforming the information environment and allowing individuals and groups unprecedented opportunities to share ideas, actions, emotions, conflicts, and activities. While this enables social groups to expand their membership in the global online community, it also allows scientists to use the social media environment as a real-world laboratory to study emerging behaviors in this space. For military analysts, this environmental laboratory provides an opportunity to study communities in advance of deployments to foreign soil. In the same way that military logisticians would study physical terrain to plan for equipment, analysts can observe activities in the information environment to plan for negotiations in the social terrain. This presentation will discuss key concepts for modeling the social terrain and will identify promising AI techniques for each. Key concepts will include Human, Information, Interpretation, and Influence considerations. AI technologies will be discussed for each of the following social terrain considerations: Human, Information, Interpretation, and Influence. Together, these elements form the underpinning science of sensemaking within the new information environment. The Human Systems Community of Interest (HS COI) within the US Department of Defense (US DOD) is exploring how to jointly establish effective capabilities in this sphere for rapid exploitation at the tactical operational levels. This paper will address the priorities and future needs of this Joint research effort and will explore technical challenges that face the transition of research results to system- level applications.