Toward culturally informed option awareness for influence operations with S-CAT

Abstract

The Socio-Cultural Analysis Tool (S-CAT) is being developed to help decision makers better understand the plausible effects of actions taken in situations where the impact of culture is both significant and subtle. We describe S-CAT in the context of a hypothetical influence operation that serves as an illustrative use case. One of the many challenges in developing S-CAT involves providing transparency into the model. S-CAT does this by providing explanations of the analysis it provides. This paper describes how S-CAT can improve option-awareness during influence operations and discusses the explanation capabilities used by S-CAT to support transparency into the model. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.