FACETS: Forecasting Activities through Cultural, Epidemiological, and Temporal Semantics

A central challenge for the U.S. armed forces is trying to forecast how host nation populations may respond to both planned and unplanned military activities. These activities include natural and human caused events that may be kinetic or non-kinetic in nature. To address this issue, we propose to develop the Forecasting Activities through Cultural, Epidemiological, and Temporal Semantics (FACETS) system. FACETS will allow company level and above military planners and leaders to use agent-based models of a given population to forecast likely opinion changes of individuals and groups to certain events. FACETS will be rooted in theories of social identity and influence to better shape the socio-cultural landscape of a given population. Furthermore, FACETS will apply epidemiological inspired models of information spread to help forecast when and where opinions to events will change within a population. To accomplish this, FACETS will incorporate latent semantic variable techniques to find relevant events, topics, and associated opinions within a wide span of internet data sources which will serve as the informational and event space of the population.