Knexus and Parallax scientists provide computational aid for complex national security decision-making.
Dayton, OH – Under the leadership of Knexus Research Corporation (KRC), based in National Harbor, MD, its scientists collaborated with Parallax Advanced Research scientists, based in Dayton, Ohio, on research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) “Decision Aid for Prediction and Recognition of Intent, Decision and Emotion (PRIDE)” Project. PRIDE is a computational decision aid to assist senior U.S. military, diplomatic, and other national security decision makers and leaders with monitoring complex international relationships and predicting impacts of the decisions.
The first phase of PRIDE’s development involved defining and establishing the scope of actions and reasons that supported the principal cases for PRIDE end users. Researchers devised and tested goals and priorities, basic and higher order beliefs and emotions, actions, and events and used them to develop component architecture for the PRIDE system. This data was used to reason, simulate, and make inferences about actors. As a culmination of the research work, scientists developed a software prototype of the PRIDE Decision Aid to demonstrate and validate its functionality in the target domain and followed up with exploration of advanced versions of PRIDE decision processes and demonstrations geared toward illustrating PRIDE component features.
Research during the second phase of the project focused on extending the simulator to demonstrate other dimensions of soft power.
“KRC and the Parallax team jointly pushed the frontiers of the art-of-possible to deliver nuanced strategic analysis and highly effective courses of action to our military and diplomatic leadership in ways that has never been done before,” said Dr. Kalyan Gupta, president & founder, KRC.
PRIDE employs the theory-of-mind tool to represent what the goals and beliefs of a potential competitor or ally are, what they will and won't do, and what they think of the other parties involved in the equation. The team analyzed two primary scenarios: one was the war game analysis in Syria during the Obama administration, and the other was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“PRIDE is a tool for diplomatic war gaming; thinking about how leaders will respond,” said Dr. Matthew Molineaux, director of autonomy, Parallax Advanced Research. “This is a key capability in international diplomacy, which is the purpose behind creating this software.”
PRIDE also utilizes the premise that the root cause of most decisions is coming from people and their emotions. Emotions are modeled to see how they change and, in general, can provide authentic, near-perfect decision-making results.
“Understanding that an action will cause offence is important on a diplomatic stage as well as in most social relationships,” said Dr. Molineaux. “You can't represent that without a description of what those people take pride in and how they want to be viewed. So, it's very important to understand and model emotions, to know what the effects of any given action are going to be on a diplomatic stage and, in general, on a social stage.”
Knexus and Parallax scientists collaborated and modeled various conflict scenarios and evaluated them by doing a repeated Monte Carlo analysis to test the generality of knowledge representations developed during the second phase of research. In addition, they redesigned the PRIDE system architecture to enhance user interaction and refinement of advanced algorithms for decision process components.
“We harnessed the power of AI and machine learning to uniquely combine theory of mind with higher order probabilistic and cultural modeling in a computational footprint small enough to run on a standard laptop,” said Dr. Gupta.
The PRIDE team is looking for funding opportunities to develop PRIDE software into a marketable product.
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About Parallax Advanced Research
Parallax Advanced Research is a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit research institute that tackles global challenges by accelerating innovation and developing technology and solutions through strategic partnerships with government, industry, and academia across Ohio and the Nation. Together with academia, Parallax accelerates innovation that leads to new breakthroughs. Together with the government, Parallax tackles critical global challenges and delivers new solutions. Together with industry, Parallax develops groundbreaking ideas and speeds them to market. Parallax has offices in Dayton and Cleveland, Ohio, and Arlington, Virginia.
About Knexus Research Corp.
Knexus Research Corp. (KRC) is a small business and pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data privacy research and development. We deliver innovative, next-generation decision automation solutions and privacy-protecting data technologies to our federal and commercial customers. KRC’s scalable AI & ML software solutions deliver our clients measurable performance improvements, business value, and sustained competitive advantages. Our highly qualified and experienced staff includes more than a dozen individuals with PhDs and master’s degrees in computer science, data science, and mathematics, providing broad and deep software engineering expertise.