Visualization of Belief Networks (VIBES)

VIBES – Visualization of Belief Systems – is a powerful web applet for studying the dissemination of beliefs through a social system. Real-world social systems are complex, with the spread of new knowledge through networks of people depending on factors ranging from peoples’ prior knowledge to the level of trust in their close relationships to their contacts with influential people and sources of propaganda.

Existing analysis tools fall short of accurately describing this kind of system: they fail to fully integrate human dimensions, such as social, behavioral, and cultural characteristics, with state-of-the-art dynamic network analysis and visualization.

VIBES corrects this problem by wrapping three functions into one focused product powered by AutoMap and ORA. First, VIBES provides a toolkit for extracting from a community beliefs and attitude changes that are driven by underlying social networks and related to activities, key actors, environments, and resources. Second, it acts as a workspace for visualizing, reasoning about, and predicting the effects of new strategies and tactics, such as spreading propaganda and observing its influence on beliefs. Finally, its architecture supports both remote and centralized analysis – it can be accessed in web applet form on the Internet or downloaded as a package onto a local computer.

These capabilities can enable the user to gain insight into the belief systems of particular organizations, communities, and geo-spatial areas of interest, and therefore to better conduct intelligence and information operations.

VIBES is a CASOS joint collaboration with Alion and the Army G2