Charles River Analytics Develops Virtual Training Environments to Train Soldiers Social and Cultural Skills

Online, December 14, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Charles River Analytics, a developer of intelligent systems solutions, released a case study of an effort for the US Army called CAATE (Culturally Aware Agents for Training Environments). Under this effort, Charles River developed tools to rapidly and cost-effectively create game-based training applications for Soldiers that teach them mission-critical social and cultural skills. Through computer games and by interacting with CAATE-based artificially intelligent agents, Soldiers can safely train to effectively interact with residents of other countries and from different cultures.

The Problem
Today's Warfighters are increasingly engaging in peacekeeping missions, humanitarian missions, and stability and support operations. These missions often require junior leaders and Soldiers to interact and communicate effectively with people whose cultures, languages, lifestyles, and beliefs are very different from those found in the US. These missions require a variety of new skills that the US Army has not traditionally focused on, especially in the training arena.

Computer-based training in virtual environments has the potential to train Soldiers to rehearse missions with a sound knowledge of the relevant local cultural context. Existing computer simulations of culturally situated agents representing humans are either very limited in fidelity, making them unsuitable for training and rehearsal, or prohibitively expensive to develop and maintain as missions and needed skills change.

The Charles River Analytics Solution
Under the CAATE effort, Charles River designed and prototyped a modeling toolkit called Persona™ for designing computer-controlled agents for cultural training applications. The approach uses graphical social network modeling technologies to develop models of socially interconnected agents and a graphical human behavior modeling tool for creating culturally-appropriate behaviors for the simulated agents.

Charles River also developed a demonstration training application that uses socially dynamic agents in a virtual environment to teach simple social skills. One of the advantages of Persona is that it makes it easy, using a single user-facing tool, to create agents for several different virtual environments. We have used Persona to create virtual agents for a variety of simulation environments, including VBS2, OLIVE, and Half-Life 2.

The Benefit
"By using computer game technology and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), we can create realistic, immersive, virtual training environments that every Soldier can have on his or her laptop. These training environments can teach social and cultural skills that have become tremendously important for mission success," said Dr. Scott Neal Reilly, Vice President, Decision Management Systems. "For instance, Soldiers using training tools built with Persona can learn how to successfully interact with realistic, but virtual, residents of various countries in a completely safe, virtual environment."

For more information, contact Dr. Neal Reilly through www.cra.com.

About Charles River Analytics: Since 1983, Charles River Analytics has been applying computational intelligence technologies to develop mission-relevant tools and solutions to transform our customers' data into knowledge that drives accurate assessment and robust decision-making. Charles River continues to grow its technology, customer base, and strategic alliances through research and development programs for the DoD and the Intelligence Community, addressing a broad spectrum of mission areas and functional domains, including: sensor and image processing, situation assessment and decision aiding, human systems integration, and cyber analytics. These efforts have resulted in a series of successful products that support continued growth in our core R&D contracting business, as well as the commercial sector.

The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this announcement are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision.