Dear all,
I am pleased to announce that tomorrow at Applied Stats we will hear a talk from Professor
Amy Silva (Northeastern and Charles River Analytics) entitled Scalable Analysis of
Behavioral Models and Decision-Making.
As per usual, the talk will be held at 12noon in CGIS
K354<http://map.harvard.edu/?bld=04471&level=9> and lunch will be served.
Abstract: The ability to model, forecast, and understand the behavioral dynamics and
decision-making patterns of human agents has applications in many contexts. One
particularly salient domain is the field of international security where artificial
intelligence models can be leveraged to analyze complex and uncertain security situations.
Real world datasets can contain 10^30,000 possible behaviors—requiring efficient
techniques to manage the confluence of cultural, social, economic, political, and temporal
information. In this talk, I will present a probabilistic logic formalism, the Stochastic
Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) framework, and several scalable reasoning algorithms for
modeling behavioral dynamics. SOMA has been used to study the Afghan drug trade, violent
ethnopolitical conflicts in the Middle East and Asia Pacific, and the terror organization
Lashkar-e-Taiba. Interpreting and using these models in national security settings
requires human insight into characteristic relationships of the domain as well as
computational methods such to handle the overwhelming quantity of data. I will briefly
discuss the Model Analyst’s Toolkit, a software tool designed to leverage both human
knowledge and computational power to refine models and aid in decision-making, and the
SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP), a prototype system that allows users throughout
the national security community to analyze the behaviors of violent organizations.
Tess
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Tess Wise
PhD Candidate
Harvard Department of Government
http://tesswise.com