Decision Aid for Prediction and Recognition of Intent, Decision, and Emotion (PRIDE)

Decision making and development of potential courses of action at militarily strategic levels presents challenges due to sociocultural factors, conflicting goals, and an often complex web of relationships among international actors. However, current computational tools may not anticipate and account for deception and recognize when planned actions may appear to contradict a desired message. For this reason, we propose to create a decision aid for Prediction and Recognition of Intent, Decision, and Emotion (PRIDE) that will model and reason about the observations, beliefs, and goals of actors to help understand and predict their reactions. PRIDE will develop tools incorporating four related capabilities: (1) assessment of other actors’ likely attitudes, beliefs, and goals; (2) estimation of possible actions and reactions of other actors; (3) evaluation of international courses of action; and (4) suggestion of revised international courses of action. We will develop novel higher-order representations of beliefs and goals to support theory-of-mind reasoning, intent recognition, and cognitive appraisal simulation. PRIDE will improve decision making in multi-party strategic scenarios by providing alternative perspectives on complex situations.