DARPA to Hold Proposers Day on Social System Simulation Devt Program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will conduct a Proposers Day through webcast on April 20 to discuss a program that seeks to verify the accuracy of social science-related modeling methods through the use of computer-based, artificial social simulations.

DARPA said Friday the Ground Truth program aims to develop simulated social systems that will work as testbeds for the evaluation of such modeling methods.

“By creating a testbed environment, we’re essentially seeing if social scientists can develop models that accurately ‘reverse engineer’ an artificial social system by correctly identifying the causal rules designed into the simulation,” said Adam Russell, program manager at DARPA’s defense sciences office.

“We call it forensic social science,” he added.

The Ground Truth program will require a team of researchers to develop simulated social systems with related ground truth causal rules and another team to determine the rules in the simulations through creation of teaming approaches.

The initiative also aims to identify new modeling methods to predict various types of complex social systems and guide future investments in such methods for operations and research.