Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman Recent documents in Barry G Silverman en-us Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:27:06 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/26 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/26 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:36 PST The video gaming industry has experienced extraordinary technological growth in the recent past, causing a boom in both the quality and revenue of these games. Educational games, on the other hand, have lagged behind this trend, as their creation presents major creative and pedagogical challenges in addition to technological ones. By providing the technological advances of the entertainment genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators, and developing an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games can be realized. Section 1 postulates three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 2 and 3 present progress on simple versions of those tools and a case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create an interactive drama. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/25 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/25 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:34 PST Ineffective search engines on e-catalog sites are driving away potential customers. Natural-language querying improves precision and parsing capability, and with advances in the technology, it can also meet these shopping sites' performance demands. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/24 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/24 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:31 PST Intelligence analysts must clear at least three hurdles to get good product out the door: cognitive biases, social biases and self-imposed organizational impediments. Others (e.g., Gilovich, et al., Heuer, and Kahneman and Tversky), explain the cognitive processes that can help or trip us. A less well mapped set of dangers arises in the social dynamics of communicating tasking, working with other analysts, editing and customer interaction. Finally, the mere fact of a unit's published record creates analytic inertia - an argument at rest tends to stay at rest and one in motion (i.e., ambiguous or uncertain) tends to stay in motion. (A variation of this includes groupthink.) Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/23 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/23 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:29 PST A holy grail for military, diplomatic, and intelligence analysis is a valid set of software agent models that act as the desired ethno-political factions so that one can test the effects that may arise from alternative courses of action in different lands. This article enumerates the challenges of such a testbed and describes best-of-breed leader and follower profiling models implemented to improve the realism and validity of the agent. Realistic, 'descriptive' agents are contrasted to rational actor theory in terms of the different equilibria one would expect to emerge in conflict games. These predictions are examined in two real world cases (Iraq and SE Asia) where the agent models are subjected to validity tests and a policy experiment is then run. We conclude by arguing that substantial effort on game realism, best-of-breed social science models, and agent validation efforts is essential if analytic experiments are to effectively explore conflicts and alternative ways to influence outcomes. Such efforts are likely to improve behavioral game theory as well. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/22 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/22 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:26 PST This paper describes an effort to foster the availability of Human Behavior Models / Performance Moderator Functions (HBM/PMFs) that the modeling and simulation community can use to increase the realism of their human behavior models. HBM/PMFs quantify the impact of human performance to internal and external stressors, and help to capture the role of personality and individual differences. To facilitate that process, we are creating a web-based anthology of HBM/PMFs that abstracts many 100s of them from diverse literatures, maps them into a taxonomy and common mathematical framework suitable for implementation, and assesses their validity and reuse issues. This paper reports on progress to date, anthology construction issues, and lessons learned. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/21 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/21 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:24 PST This paper describes the efforts of a consortium that is trying to develop and validate formal methods and a meta-environment for authoring, checking, and maintaining a large repository of machine executable practice guidelines. The goal is to integrate and extend a number of open software standards so that guidelines in the meta-environment become a resource that any vendor can plug their applications into and run in their proprietary environment provided they conform to the interface standards. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/20 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/20 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:21 PST Many producers and consumers of legacy training simulator and game environments are beginning to envision a new era where psycho-socio-physiologic models could be interoperated to enhance their environments' simulation of human agents. This paper explores whether we could embed our behavior modeling framework (described in the companion paper, Part 1) behind a legacy first person shooter 3D game environment to recreate portions of the Black Hawk Down scenario. Section 1 amplifies the interoperability needs and challenges confronting the field, presents the questions that are examined, and describes the test scenario. Sections 2 and 3 review the software and knowledge engineering methodology, respectively, needed to create the system and populate it with bots. Results (Section 4) and discussion (Section 5) reveal that we were able to generate plausible and adaptive recreations of Somalian crowds, militia, women acting as shields, suicide bombers, and more. Also, there are specific lessons learned about ways to advance the field so that such interoperabilities will become more affordable and widespread. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/19 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/19 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:19 PST This paper begins by describing a universally recurring socio-cultural 'game' of inter-group competition for control of resources. It next describes efforts to author software agents able to play the game as real humans would - which suggests the ability to study alternative ways to influence them, observe PMESII effects, and potentially understand how best to alter the outcomes of potential conflict situations. These agents are unscripted, but use their decision making to react to events as they unfold and to plan out responses. For each agent, a software called PMFserv operates its perception and runs its physiology and personality/value system to determine fatigue and hunger, injuries and related stressors, grievances, tension buildup, impact of rumors and speech acts, emotions, and various collective and individual action decisions. The paper wraps up with a correspondence test from a SE Asian ethnic conflict, the results of which indicate significant correlation between real and agent-based outcomes. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/18 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/18 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:15 PST This research explores ways of harnessing people's passion for entertainment in order to stimulate players to attain the meta-learning skills they need for lifelong learning and to reach the highest level of learning, that of learning by teaching. More specifically to keep up with today's pace of training and the goal for it to be just-intime, we are interested in creating a game generator to empower grass roots experts to share their stories in such a way that others learn the lessons by engagement and empathy with the storyworld characters. Doing so requires us to address the fundamental issue that caused the entertainment and educational gaming communities to split: that it is not easy to create something fun while constrained by rigid pedagogical goals. We examine a case study of the attempts of one cross-disciplinary team to overcome aesthetic silos, and propose a critical systems methodology and generator that harness the core mechanics that make gaming fun, while providing an accessible means for educators to create content to deliver the educational payload. Barry G. Silverman http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/17 http://works.bepress.com/barry_silverman/17 Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:08:13 PST This paper summarizes efforts at adapting a personality profiling framework to model behavior and choices of political and military leaders. This is part of a larger project to create a role-playing, decision-making game to allow you to play out scenarios of interest against other leaders. In this modeling exercise we implement the Hermann leader personality profile tool to create historic leaders (Saladin, Richard I, etc.). We then attempt to validate the leader agents against scenarios of the 3rd Crusade. Barry G. Silverman