IvySys Technologies of Arlington, VA announced on April 3 that it has been awarded a Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract for up to $1.5 million, dependent upon successful completion of milestones, by the US Army Contracting Command for support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim) program.
“As recent geopolitical events have evidenced, we need a new approach to accurately analyze and predict the spread of global online information at-scale,” said Dr. James DeBardelaben, president and CEO of IvySys Technologies. “IvySys will bring forward our proven big data and advanced analytics capabilities as we partner with DARPA to confront this rising challenge.”
The goal of the SocialSim program is to develop innovative technologies for high-fidelity computational simulation of online behavior. The program will support efforts to analyze strategic disinformation campaigns by adversaries and advance other critical missions in the online information domain.
The way online information shapes understanding and influences outcomes of events in the world has been a hot-button topic recently. Today’s openness of global information enables anyone to freely self-publish online with no editing, fact checking or accountability. At the same time, the new paradigm of information creation and flow provides nation-states and nonstate actors the opportunity to deliberately spread deceptive and inaccurate information throughout the globe without detection.
Under the three-year contract, IvySys plans to deliver quantitative predictive models that capture the dynamics of how information trending in one online domain penetrates into another. IvySys’ approach will exploit the fact that orchestrated misinformation campaigns produce different spreading patterns than naturally-occurring information behavior to enable early detection of inauthentic online behavior.
Having worked with DARPA since 2006, IvySys is now combating these new threats by extending its extensive signal processing-based advanced analytics capabilities, honed in the signals intelligence (SIGINT) and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) domains, to the big data and social network analytics domains.
Source: IvySys
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