Jane Edwards
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected research teams for a program that seeks to build automated tools and techniques to help analysts detect, track and characterize geopolitical influence campaigns online.
DARPA said Thursday the research teams selected for the Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking program will be led by Smart Information Flow Technologies, Protagonist Technology, Uncharted Software, Lockheed Martin, University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security.
“As adversaries seek to exploit misinformation as well as true information delivered via influence messaging, U.S. analysts need automated tools to help detect and make sense of adversarial influencer campaigns – allowing them to move away from largely manual and ad hoc approaches,” said Brian Kettler, Information Innovation Office program manager overseeing INCAS.
The INCAS program has five research areas and teams led by Protagonist Technology, SIFT and University of Southern California ISI will focus on the first research area. Under this technical area, the teams will develop tools to detect detect geopolitical influence indicators in multilingual messaging tools online.
University of Southern California ISI and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will lead the teams responsible for the second technical area that aims to develop techniques to segment the responding population and determine demographic and psychographic attributes related to geopolitical influence.
Unchartered Software will oversee a group responsible for building data modeling tools with human-machine interfaces to help facilitate comparison of campaign models.
Lockheed’s advanced technology laboratories will build a testbed and offer data feeds to help research teams assess their INCAS tools.
University of Maryland ARLIS will design and perform tech assessments and come up with ground truth evaluation data and support transition evaluation activities.
