Virtual Personalities for Online Counterinsurgency (VPOC)

Effective U.S. counterinsurgency operations, including counter-recruiting efforts, will need to understand and undermine the narratives that insurgents use for recruiting, support, and fundraising, and replace them with new narratives that encourage peaceful engagement. Current insurgent messages are often propagated through virtual media such as web sites, blogs, and on-line games; counter-insurgency operations will need to respond in these same media. We propose to develop technology for creating Virtual Iconic Presences (VIPs), which are software-based agents that can work individually or in groups to propagate a coherent narrative message that can be widely disseminated through virtual space. We will build VIPs using existing believable agent technology, which has been used previously to create interactive, personality-rich agents for art and entertainment applications. We will draw on a number of natural language understanding and generation technologies to enable VIPs to understand and comment on news feeds and less formal online content. We will also create an interactive narrative planning system that will support the creation of robust and adaptive counter-narrative strategies using VIPs. Finally, we will develop a roadmap for the successful development, evaluation, and deployment of such VIP-based counter-insurgency operations.