POC: For inquiries regarding this work, please contact Dr. Sabrina Pagano (spagano@nsiteam.com).  

Project Team: Elisa Bienenstock, Ph.D.; Sabrina Pagano, Ph.D

Description: On behalf of Charles River Analytics, NSI evaluated whether a set of selected situation reports (SITREPs) contained information related to the social, cultural, or political context of relevant operations, which could in turn be used to inform the selection of socially aware courses of actions (COAs). To achieve this goal, NSI conducted a manifest content analysis to examine and extract HSCB-relevant information. Social, cultural, and political information is often unrecognized and unused in intelligence reports since the primary focus of these reports is identifying and assisting in the eradication of threat by kinetic actions. This work made two key assumptions, that 1) sources that provide intelligence information also contain mission-relevant HSCB information, and 2) it is possible to extract and systematically code HSCB-relevant data from sources collected for other purposes for ingest by computational tools. The goal of the conducted analysis was to establish a proof of concept demonstrating support for these assumptions. The NSI team also aimed to demonstrate how to rigorously extract and utilize the information on social and cultural context present in these reports. Ultimately, this type of analysis can facilitate the generation of a set of socially aware COAs that provide crucial context informed by the extracted content and illuminate the downstream effect of a variety of potential actions. This effort yielded a successful proof of concept for the extraction and coding of HSCB-relevant information, which can be achieved either manually or using automated methods that maintain the researcher’s role in extracting, systematically coding, and most importantly, interpreting the meaning of extracted HSCB-relevant information.