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

Description: In the Socio-cultural Geo-Informatics Lab (SGIL) program, NSI built a state-of-the-art socio-cultural geo-informatics test bed to support assessment, test, and evaluation (T&E) as well as supporting the transition of Human Social Culture Behavior Modeling (HSCB) technologies. In order to support the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s HSCB modeling initiative, NSI collaborated with government, industry, FFRDCs, and academic partners to perform validation and applied research, early testing and transition of prototypes, maturing and hardening of test bed; testing and evaluation (T&E) of HSCB models; and specification of metrics.

NSI built core infrastructure within Army Geospatial Center’s Joint Geospatial Enterprise Services (JGES) facility, designed a socio-cultural data collection approach, and developed a GeoWiki and an agent-based civil unrest Thai software prototype in AnyLogic. This modeling environment was later integrated with two other systems to simulate the insertion of near-live information into the geospatial modeling execution environment.  The first was an automated internet harvesting and text analytic set of processes driven by an SME built taxonomy.  The second system was a human vetted social network database application which utilized strictly SME inputs.  The agent based system fed directly from these two systems for a comparative exercise (i.e., a prototype).  

Within the 2009 timeframe, NSI implemented and maintained a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multi-platform modeling environment that supported agent based and system dynamics modeling. NSI built specific tools to support the capture of information from the HSCB test and assessment activities.  These tools were portal based and collaborative and served effectively to capture both explicit and implicit knowledge.

During the 2008 contract period, NSI built a taxonomy of terms and lexical resources that were used within a text-analytic engine to classify internet news articles in near real-time. NSI developed and taught a specially tailored short course on anthropology to HSCB program managers and other support personnel. The course was designed to familiarize HSCB staff with the fundamentals of anthropology and key anthropological theories of human conflict. The objective was to provide HSCB personnel with enough background to enhance their abilities to manager and judge HSCB programs that have a cultural component. Materials were presented and break out sessions were conducted in which participants practiced lessons learned to evaluate anthropological articles on terrorism and insurgency. A course evaluation form indicated a very high degree of satisfaction with the course length, presentation, content and usefulness. Additional courses in social science topics are currently under development.