Communications of the ACM
DARPA Wants to Simulate How Social Media Spreads Info Like Wildfire
A new program from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aims to better understand the spread and evolution of information online.
Credit: Zeendo.com
The Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim), a new program from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), aims to better understand the spread and evolution of information online.
SocialSim will develop technologies to support computational simulation of online social media activities, as existing approaches to social and behavioral simulation are limited.
The U.S. government currently employs experts to speculate how information spreads, and the accuracy of their conclusions is unknown. DARPA scientists say highly accurate and scalable computerized simulations could help analyze strategic disinformation campaigns by adversaries, deliver critical information to populations affected by disasters, and contribute to other information-gathering missions.
Specific SocialSim objectives will include the development of large-scale simulation technologies and efficient methods for providing data to support simulation. Methods and metrics for assessing the accuracy and scalability of simulations also will be explored.
SocialSim is the most recent of DARPA's social media projects. Last year, the agency announced the Force Protection in the Online Information Environment program, which seeks to develop automated software to detect online threats against U.S. service members stationed overseas.
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Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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