I like to follow DARPA’s work, which I view as tapping into the brains of really smart people and processes.  This is why a current project of theirs caught my eye: “Tools for the Analysis of Social and Group Dynamics”, (SB101-005).

The project involves “… providing advanced understanding to a non-expert”, which might be a nice concise definition of knowledge management. It “… seeks (to develop) novel technologies that can be brought to bear upon the problem of analyzing the dynamics of a complex society and gaining insights into the potential effects of policies, plans, and courses of actions in such environments. ” In other words, software that would enable one to undertand the social dynamics in a group, and perhaps help you predict the likely outcome of hypothetical events. Neat, huh?

Specifically, “DARPA is interested in developing tools that can assist military planners and decision makers at any echelon by providing them with the kind of insights that high-level leaders currently have access to via human experts.” Note emphasis on eliminating the current bottleneck: human experts.

The announcement continues by stating that a “… wide variety of technical approaches and solutions are envisioned and would be in scope, from networking technologies that can effectively put planners in touch with available experts; to modeling and simulation technologies that allow “what if” analysis; to innovative information storage and retrieval techniques for acquiring and applying lessons learned. What is essential is that the proposed technology provides a means for a reasonably intelligent non-expert to easily and effectively gain relevant expert-level insight into the potential behavior of a complex, dynamic society. ” Of course, given my focus, I was pleased to see the recognition given to expertise finding as one option for addressing this goal.

As has become typical in recent years, DARPA is seeking practicality assessments, such as determining the availability of data and the difficulty of acquisition, as well as evaluating ease-of-use issues and the explainability of models in the case of modeling projects.

Of course, DARPA is concerned with understanding “… the cultural and political dynamics of complex societies”, rather than expertise finding for biomedical researchers, but hey, I find it fascinating that they believe this area is worth tackling, even under high-risk/high-benefit expectations. This is yet another example of the kinds of smarts the US government regularly demonstrates, yet are rarely appreciated by most of the public, I suspect.

Last, check out the interesting references they provide. I found the Epstein book particularly interesting.

• R. M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, Inc.: New York, 1994.
• J. Epstein, Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling, Princeton University Press, 2006.
• I.O. Lesser, Coalition Dynamics in the War against Terrorism, The International Spectator, Feb. 2002.
• R.E. Neustadt & E.R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, Free Press, New York, 1986.
• P. Schrodt, Forecasting Conflict in the Balkans using Hidden Markov Models. Pp. 161-184 in Robert Trappl, ed. Programming for Peace: Computer-Aided Methods for International Conflict Resolution and Prevention. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006.