CARE – SNL Partnership on Messaging’s Social Effects

Sandia National Laboratories, the engineering science and technology laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy, has been collaborating with the Cyber Policy Studies at a the Center for Assurance Research and Engineering (CARE) at George Mason University. The intent is to produce capabilities that enable the U.S. government to better understand and anticipate the effect of various forms of messaging on societies. Specifically, this collaboration is intended to develop a research and development effort that exploits academic studies, along with socio-behavioral, economic, and geopolitical data that is coupled with geopolitical computational models to explore such things as how different types of messaging by state and non-state adversarial groups, can influence various populations. This effort also seeks to better understand how different communication domains can ultimately affect behaviors within various societies. This can be applied to hard security, human security / crisis management, and intelligence domains.