Culturally Aware Agents for Training Environments (CAATE)

During the last decade, the U.S. Army has conducted a wide range of missions within the context of very different cultures. These missions often require Soldiers 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 in order to be effective. We propose a simulation-based training approach to providing the necessary training for success across such culturally situated missions. By focusing on the social and cultural elements that most affect mission success, we believe we can limit the problem to a tractable size. We propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of Culturally Aware Agents for Training Environments (CAATE), a modeling and simulation tool for software agents that demonstrate the necessary cultural skills and behaviors for maximally affordable and effective culturally situated training systems. CAATE will embody sound didactic methodologies, it will utilize social network models for modeling the social and cultural situation, and it will support the development of human behavior models with built-in behavior moderator support to model appropriate cultural behavior.