Overview on CASOS Projects

Within CASOS we attempt to understand and formally model two distinct, but complementary types of phenomena:

1. Human groups, organizations, institutions or society, which are universally informatted and continually acquire, manipulate, and produce information (and possibly other material goods) through the joint, and interlocked activities of people and automated information technologies.
2. The artificial computational system, which is generally comprised of multiple distributed agents who can mutually influence, constrain and support each other as they try to manage and manipulate the knowledge, communication and interaction networks in which they are embedded.

Researchers in the CASOS Center look at issues of adaptation, evolution, culture, command and control, and identification of vulnerabilities and change agents. The work in this center is in the area of dynamic network analysis and combines social networks, link analysis, text mining, mahcine learning, and multi-agent simulation to address complex real world problems. Much of this work looks at how the interface between systems constrains and enables behavior. For example, the mutual constraints between social and cognitive systems, between social and cultural systems, between social and technological systems.

Many of our projects fall into these categories:

• Network Science and Social Network Methods
• Organizational Design and Dynamics
• Terrorism, Extremists and Crime
• Information Diffusion, Disinformation, Beliefs
• Agent Based Simulation
• Medical Applications and Public Health
• Tools (ORA-Lite, Automap, Construct, Biowar, and others)

For a complete list of all projects see:

• All Projects

Four major recent project areas are:

• Trails
• Health Care Trails
• Trail Identification and High Dimensional Networks
• Factions
• Socio-cultural Cognitive Mapping
• Community Detection in Complex Networks
• Social-Cybersecurity
• Cyber-FIT
• Cyber Resiliency
• Cybersecurity
• Computational Models for Stance Taking on Social Media
• MURI: Persuasion, Identity and Morality in Social-Cyber Environments
• Minerva: Multi-Level Models of Covert Online Information Campaigns

In CASOS, applied and theoretical work go hand-in-hand. Research is done both to develop new models and methods and new theories. Most projects involve one or more of the basic tools and is associated with one or more of the domains identified. CASOS research develops, tests, and validates new models and metrics. In Addition, new models and metrics to understand basic social phenomena and address key theoretical and methodological issues in the four domains.