POC: For inquiries regarding this work, please contact Dr. Robert Popp (rpopp@nsiteam.com).  

Project Team: Dr. Elisa Bienenstock (Principle Investigator) and Dr. Robert Popp (Program Manger), Dr. Lawrence A. Kuznar, Dr. Allison Astorino-Courtois

Description: The Goals-Means (GM) Meta-Model was developed for the IARPA PAINT (Proactive Intelligence) program. PAINT sought to develop models and methods to assist the United States Government in revealing the motivations, intentions and activities of individuals and groups that threaten its security. One of the primary objectives of the PAINT program is to develop systematic approaches to discover what is not readily knowable about foreign entities abilities and intentions to develop technologies or capabilities that threaten US interests. Unlike similar efforts, PAINT is not an attempt to predict future outcomes; instead, its focus is to reveal direct evidence of specific development pathway programs, and additional information to validate or update existing analytic models.

NSI contributed a hybrid leadership decision-making Goals-Means (GM) meta-model to the PAINT program. The primary benefits of this model were fourfold: (i) allowing insight into the likely intentions, strategies and choices of foreign leaders; (ii)enabling comparison of sets of potential decision outcomes as explicitly linked to empirical data analyses; (iii) allowing perturbations, modifications and updating of original input data; and (iv) accommodating both data-rich analyses and those analyses where available data is sparse.