POWER: Political Will Expert Reasoning Tool

There are many challenges in addressing the problem of Political Will. The first is developing a clear, complete, consensual definition of Political Will driven by both theory and field practice. But a larger challenge is deconstructing and unpacking the Political Science and Social Science concept of Political Will into its complex constituent elements in order to arrive at their computational, representational, and algorithmic characteristics. In other words, to make it computable. The team of 21st Century Systems Incorporated and RTI International is pleased to propose to research and develop our POWER (Political Will Expert Reasoning) tool. The tool is intended to help operational and tactical military leaders to reach informed decisions critical to the success in the USG stabilization efforts by providing information about the country's political leaders and assessing their willingness to collaborate with the USG on counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and stabilization. The POWER concept utilizes a computational model of Political Will accounting for its complex, non-binary structure and changes over time. We will also investigate application of three types of cutting-edge intelligent information processing technologies: probabilistic evidential reasoning with uncertain, imprecise, and incomplete information; multi-lingual text processing and text mining technologies, and natural language-motivated knowledge representation and reasoning technologies.