CUES: Cyber-mediated Usable Emotional Sensors

The objective of this project is to assess the feasibility of, and lay the ground work for, creating cyber-mediated usable emotional sensors (CUES) and using them for improved detection and assessment of information maneuvers. CUES will be a robust, reusable, cross-cultural capability for rapidly assessing a group’s emotional climate vis-a-vis a topic using social media posts. CUES will be part of an overarching message assessment system that will support identification, classification, and assessment of the impact of information maneuvers. CUES will be developed using an emotional intelligence methodological approach which rests on using socio-cognitive and organizational science findings about the effect of emotions to direct the integration of social network analytic and machine learning techniques. Unlike traditional approaches to sentiment and emotion, CUES are based on the more stable and measurable thought-action consequences of the underlying emotional state, for primary emotions, at both the social network level (for sender and receiver) and the narrative level. Baseline testing and demonstration will be done with data focused on Russian, Middle Eastern and possibly Chinese information campaigns in the Ukraine, the Middle East, Japan and the Philippines. This will support assessment over a wide range of information maneuvers, across multiple cultures, and languages.