Johns Hopkins APL to Help DARPA Assess Social Science Methods for Ground Truths

John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has received a $3.7 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to assess social science modeling approaches to reveal hidden truths in complex social systems.

For a tw0 and one-half year period, APL said Wednesday it will work with JHU Whiting School of Engineering, Cornell University, University of Hawaii and Graphika on the Ground Truth Program. 

The program will involve studying the actions of simulated agents and predicting future outcomes to help DARPA further understand the characteristics of different social science modeling methods.

The initiative will also provide a guide on how social, cultural, behavioral and political factors connect with each other.

The Laurel, Md.-based research center explained that the “ground truth” is rarely discovered, which makes it difficult for social scientists to identify the accuracy and connections of several social methods.

“Our Ground Truth team will quantitatively test the explanatory and predictive power of social science theories on large-scale population datasets where influence processes affect the behavior of individual actors,” said Aurora Schmidt, Ground Truth principal investigator at APL’s Research and Exploratory Development Department.