1. HSCB Focus 2010 Overview August 5-7, 2009 Chantilly, Virginia
Sponsored by Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD),
Human Social Cultural Behavior Modeling Program
Reported by Kathy Ertell

2. Conference Purpose Sponsored projects (grantees) demonstrate progress
Idea exchange between program leadership, contractors, users, and stakeholders
Feedback on direction and success of HSCB for program leaders
Identify new partners and evaluate current partners
Planning for transitions, demonstrations, integration
Exploration of funding opportunities
Networking

3. Attendees Military – Army, Navy, Air Force, DTRA, DARPA
Defense Contractors – large and small
Universities – many
National Laboratories – small contingent
International government – Canada, Netherlands
About 600 attendees

4. Technical Session Focus Areas
Model validation and verification
Architecture for socio-cultural modeling
Operational influence modeling and decision support
Mission rehearsal and training
Visualization and geo-spatial analysis
Social network analysis
Understanding human behavior
Advancing analytics in irregular warfare
Transitioning HSCB tools

5. Model Validation and Verification
How to evaluate predictive models to see if they are valid, and if they can be verified – are they relatively accurate and reliable?
Theories and methods
Special techniques for validating social-cultural and human behavioral models
Computational science methods
Test beds
Continuous testing once models are deployed
Expert systems analysis

6. Architecture for Socio-cultural Modeling
Conceptual design and operational structure of computer systems and programs
New architectures to support design, development, operation of socio-cultural models
Limitations of computer architecture
Integration of existing tools
Designing user interfaces
Focus on what’s being developed, not what’s existing

7. Operational Influence Modeling and Decision Support
How modeling can help commanders identify trends and develop courses of action
How models can forecast based on collecting, extracting, and assessing data from various sources
Cultural geography – environment, people, things, operations, laws, cultural norms
Approaches to predict behavior – demonstration projects, analogies to models used for other purposes
Using data from communication ( , media, blogs)
Resources for insurgency/terrorism prediction

8. Mission Rehearsal and Training
Training the military forces in cultural issues
Resources, programs, and needs
Learning models, theory
Tools: simulation of intercultural interactions, interpersonal skill development, role playing, scenarios
Game-based training
Web-based training
Continuous training
Evaluation: does the training help?

9. Geo-Spatial Visualization and Analysis
How GVA fits into the military mission
Approaches to visualizing the data, model outputs to make it useful to end users, who are not computer gurus
Gaps and challenges in the GVA tools in use
Reports from projects that are refining current tools and developing new tools
Probably the most well-developed technique – has its own conference

10. Social Network Analysis
State of SNA in the military: gap in practice and theory, stand-alone capabilities with little integration of tools and results with other analysis
Developing meaningful and useful SNA – demonstrate the value to the military
Validation techniques – does it work?
Individual SNA tools and integration – analyzing media, web, crowd, community behavior, as groups
Crowd behavior test bed: Target Behavioral Response Laboratory
Visualizing belief systems from SNA

11. Understanding Human Behavior
Cognitive neuroscience –brain responses to events and messages, and correlates of decision making
Using opinion surveys to measure political unrest
Behavior of crowds in labs and computer simulations
Tools for using stories and narratives to understand people and their behavior
Cultural influences on reasoning
Conflict modeling
Nonverbal behavior

12. Advancing Analytics in Irregular Warfare
Irregular warfare: struggles among state and non-state actors for status, legitimacy, influence in their population or country
Old models of warfare do not fit irregular warfare
DOD needs to be able to analyze the irregular warfare environment
Challenges in development, data analysis, verification
How to do better analysis

13. Transitioning HSCB Tools
Roundtable discussion – how to make progress in getting applications to the end users
Need for open source data to improve quality of science
Need to link language and culture, and make better use of machine-language translation – needed because of the huge volume of data
Overcoming skepticism among end users
Understanding the military and its culture, in order to make tools the military can – and will- use

14. General Impressions
The military is looking for answers to problems they have never faced before – new techniques for new situations.
There is skepticism in the military about whether HSCB modeling will work.
There is enormous enthusiasm among defense contractors and universities for participating in the work.
Many presentations seemed pie-in-the-sky, still conceptual, not well-developed – perhaps due to only 6 months of work.
Heavy emphasis on computer analytics and modeling of easily available data – not much on gathering data about individuals.

15. More General Impressions
Defense contractors and academia had, by far, the largest number of attendees.
DOE Labs did not present any work that was unexpected or out of character with our usual missions
DOE work focused on predictive analytics and computational methods
DOD actively seeking to involve small business and academia – role for National Labs may be limited.
Many attendees were networking and looking for funding opportunities.
DOD was actively evaluating their contractors.