Culturally and Socially Aware Believable Agents (CASABA)

Stability operations often require junior leaders and Warfighters with limited experience to interact and communicate personally and effectively with people whose cultures, languages, lifestyle, and beliefs are very different from those found in the U.S. It has become increasingly clear that strategy, operational plans, and implementing procedures must occur in the context of local cultural constraints to be effective. We propose to develop easy-to-use tools for creating virtual environments for socio-cultural training applications, including CGFs which can generate behavior and interpret their surroundings (including the trainee and his actions) based on realistic, nuanced cultural behavior models that are updated in real-time based on real-world data sources. We propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of Culturally And Socially Aware Believable Agents (CASABA), a tool for rapidly creating socially and culturally realistic virtual agents for immersive cultural training applications that dynamically adapt to the changing cultural environment. CASABA can deliver the required immersive cultural training to warfighters both before deployment as well as during deployment to best prepare Warfighters for mission success across a full spectrum of operations and cultures.