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Multi-Source Assessment of State Stability

PI: Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University

Year Selected for Award: 2013

Multi-Source Assessment of State Stability

Principal Investigator: Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University

Co-investigators: Huan Liu and Mia Bloom

Years of Award: 2013-2019

Managing Service Agency: Office of Naval Research

Project Description:

Social media is the battleground in which wars are fought for the hearts and minds of populations. Some argue that the US is losing this war.  In this environment information maneuvers are conducted that have the potential to disrupt state stability.  This work provides the Navy with a set of tactics, techniques and procedures for identifying information maneuvers that have the potential to destabilize states. These techniques combine high dimensional network analytics with machine learning techniques and explore data across multiple contexts using both large scale data science assessments and in depth ethnographic assessments.
New methods, procedures, theories and empirical results that enable the analyst to determine whether at-risk groups and states are being impacted by information maneuvers have been developed, tested and used in actual exercises.

The objective was to understand the information maneuvers through which traditional and social media could be used to manipulate at-risk groups, and generate state stability and instability. The overarching objective was to develop a new theory about influence in a cyber-mediated environment.  The secondary objective was to develop new methods and algorithms for assessing influence and deception in this environment, to identify information maneuvers, and to measure their impact. A tertiary objective was to harden any new operational tools developed, improve their scalability, and demonstrate their reuse across contexts.