Adaptive Feature Oriented Recommender Engine (AFORE)

This proposal for continued Phase II implementation, evaluation, and transition of the Adaptive Feature Oriented Recommendation Engine (AFORE). Social media is an increasingly important source of time-critical information for a range of problems including monitoring information operations carried out by adversaries, analyzing terrorist propaganda, and obtaining situational awareness in post-disaster situations. Social media is characterized by overwhelming volumes, complexities, and rates of flow of data, and accordingly there is a critical DoD need for technology to provide real-time support to analysts who are monitoring and analyzing social media. AFORE addresses this need by providing automation tools for keyword set management based on a unique combination of individually tried and tested techniques. In Phase I we accomplished all of our technical objectives, and most important, we established the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G2 as a transition partner for the AFORE program. TRADOC G2 has committed to actively supporting AFORE in Phase II in particular by providing domain expertise, support for development and testing, and evaluation of AFORE research and development, as well as by developing a plan to insert the system in both the Institutional Army (Training) and the Operational Army (Combat Operations).