Collaborative World Modeling

Abstract

The current state of the art in world modeling involves such manual effort that it is infeasible to build large models fast enough to enhance short-term decision making about issues of national and global security. We propose an effort to automate large parts of the building and running of such models, enabling an order of magnitude reduction in development time and a significant increase in the scale of problems that can be explored. The key insight is that developing large-scale world models requires a collaboration between human analysts (providing intuition, strategic thinking and thinking out of the box) and automated intelligent systems (providing large scale data search and analysis, planning and running simulations). Model development is iterative, with extensive interaction between the analyst and the system throughout. The key components of our solution are: 1) an intuitive interface for iterative model development and evaluation, using a language-driven Collaborative Problem Solving process between users and World Modeling Systems; 2) automatic and human-assisted transformation of qualitative models to executable quantitative models by means of collaborative planning; 3) capabilities for users to define novel problems, bootstrapping from a domain-independent ontology; 4) a system that learns and improves as it interacts with its users.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Feb 14, 2019
Source ID
W911NF1810464

Entities

People

  • James F. Allen

Organizations

  • Army Contracting Command
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development