Using spatiotemporal patterns to qualitatively represent and manage dynamic situations of interest : a cognitive and integrative approach

Les situations spatio-temporelles dynamiques sont des situations qui évoluent dans l’espace et dans le temps. L’être humain peut identifier des configurations de situations dans son environnement et les utilise pour prendre des décisions. Ces configurations de situations peuvent aussi être appelées « situations d’intérêt » ou encore « patrons spatio-temporels ». En informatique, les situations sont obtenues par des systèmes d’acquisition de données souvent présents dans diverses industries grâce aux récents développements technologiques et qui génèrent des bases de données de plus en plus volumineuses. On relève un problème important dans la littérature lié au fait que les formalismes de représentation utilisés sont souvent incapables de représenter des phénomènes spatiotemporels dynamiques et complexes qui reflètent la réalité. De plus, ils ne prennent pas en considération l’appréhension cognitive (modèle mental) que l’humain peut avoir de son environnement. Ces facteurs rendent difficile la mise en œuvre de tels modèles par des agents logiciels. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un nouveau modèle de représentation des situations d’intérêt s’appuyant sur la notion des patrons spatiotemporels. Notre approche utilise les graphes conceptuels pour offrir un aspect qualitatif au modèle de représentation. Le modèle se base sur les notions d’événement et d’état pour représenter des phénomènes spatiotemporels dynamiques. Il intègre la notion de contexte pour permettre aux agents logiciels de raisonner avec les instances de patrons détectés. Nous proposons aussi un outil de génération automatisée des relations qualitatives de proximité spatiale en utilisant un classificateur flou. Finalement, nous proposons une plateforme de gestion des patrons spatiotemporels pour faciliter l’intégration de notre modèle dans des applications industrielles réelles. Ainsi, les contributions principales de notre travail sont : Un formalisme de représentation qualitative des situations spatiotemporelles dynamiques en utilisant des graphes conceptuels. ; Une approche cognitive pour la définition des patrons spatio-temporels basée sur l’intégration de l’information contextuelle. ; Un outil de génération automatique des relations spatiales qualitatives de proximité basé sur les classificateurs neuronaux flous. ; Une plateforme de gestion et de détection des patrons spatiotemporels basée sur l’extension d’un moteur de traitement des événements complexes (Complex Event Processing).Dynamic spatiotemporal situations are situations that evolve in space and time. They are part of humans’ daily life. One can be interested in a configuration of situations occurred in the environment and can use it to make decisions. In the literature, such configurations are referred to as “situations of interests” or “spatiotemporal patterns”. In Computer Science, dynamic situations are generated by large scale data acquisition systems which are deployed everywhere thanks to recent technological advances. Spatiotemporal pattern representation is a research subject which gained a lot of attraction from two main research areas. In spatiotemporal analysis, various works extended query languages to represent patterns and to query them from voluminous databases. In Artificial Intelligence, predicate-based models represent spatiotemporal patterns and detect their instances using rule-based mechanisms. Both approaches suffer several shortcomings. For example, they do not allow for representing dynamic and complex spatiotemporal phenomena due to their limited expressiveness. Furthermore, they do not take into account the human’s mental model of the environment in their representation formalisms. This limits the potential of building agent-based solutions to reason about these patterns. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to represent situations of interest using the concept of spatiotemporal patterns. We use Conceptual Graphs to offer a qualitative representation model of these patterns. Our model is based on the concepts of spatiotemporal events and states to represent dynamic spatiotemporal phenomena. It also incorporates contextual information in order to facilitate building the knowledge base of software agents. Besides, we propose an intelligent proximity tool based on a neuro-fuzzy classifier to support qualitative spatial relations in the pattern model. Finally, we propose a framework to manage spatiotemporal patterns in order to facilitate the integration of our pattern representation model to existing applications in the industry. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows: A qualitative approach to model dynamic spatiotemporal situations of interest using Conceptual Graphs. ; A cognitive approach to represent spatiotemporal patterns by integrating contextual information. ; An automated tool to generate qualitative spatial proximity relations based on a neuro-fuzzy classifier. ; A platform for detection and management of spatiotemporal patterns using an extension of a Complex Event Processing engine

MODELLING & SIMULATION HYBRID WARFARE Researches, Models and Tools for Hybrid Warfare and Population Simulation

The Hybrid Warfare phenomena, which is the subject of the current research, has been framed by the work of Professor Agostino Bruzzone (University of Genoa) and Professor Erdal Cayirci (University of Stavanger), that in June 2016 created in order to inquiry the subject a dedicated Exploratory Team, which was endorsed by NATO Modelling & Simulation Group (a panel of the NATO Science & Technology organization) and established with the participation as well of the author. The author brought his personal contribution within the ET43 by introducing meaningful insights coming from the lecture of \u201cFight by the minutes: Time and the Art of War (1994)\u201d, written by Lieutenant Colonel US Army (Rtd.) Robert Leonhard; in such work, Leonhard extensively developed the concept that \u201cTime\u201d, rather than geometry of the battlefield and/or firepower, is the critical factor to tackle in military operations and by extension in Hybrid Warfare. The critical reflection about the time - both in its quantitative and qualitative dimension - in a hybrid confrontation it is addressed and studied inside SIMCJOH, a software built around challenges that imposes literally to \u201cFight by the minutes\u201d, echoing the core concept expressed in the eponymous work. Hybrid Warfare \u2013 which, by definition and purpose, aims to keep the military commitment of both aggressor and defender at the lowest - can gain enormous profit by employing a wide variety of non-military tools, turning them into a weapon, as in the case of the phenomena of \u201cweaponization of mass migrations\u201d, as it is examined in the \u201cDies Irae\u201d simulation architecture. Currently, since migration it is a very sensitive and divisive issue among the public opinions of many European countries, cynically leveraging on a humanitarian emergency caused by an exogenous, inducted migration, could result in a high level of political and social destabilization, which indeed favours the concurrent actions carried on by other hybrid tools. Other kind of disruption however, are already available in the arsenal of Hybrid Warfare, such cyber threats, information campaigns lead by troll factories for the diffusion of fake/altered news, etc. From this perspective the author examines how the TREX (Threat network simulation for REactive eXperience) simulator is able to offer insights about a hybrid scenario characterized by an intense level of social disruption, brought by cyber-attacks and systemic faking of news. Furthermore, the rising discipline of \u201cStrategic Engineering\u201d, as envisaged by Professor Agostino Bruzzone, when matched with the operational requirements to fulfil in order to counter Hybrid Threats, it brings another innovative, as much as powerful tool, into the professional luggage of the military and the civilian employed in Defence and Homeland security sectors. Hybrid is not the New War. What is new is brought by globalization paired with the transition to the information age and rising geopolitical tensions, which have put new emphasis on hybrid hostilities that manifest themselves in a contemporary way. Hybrid Warfare is a deliberate choice of an aggressor. While militarily weak nations can resort to it in order to re-balance the odds, instead military strong nations appreciate its inherent effectiveness coupled with the denial of direct responsibility, thus circumventing the rules of the International Community (IC). In order to be successful, Hybrid Warfare should consist of a highly coordinated, sapient mix of diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces (even criminal elements), cyber disruption etc. all in order to achieve effects across the entire DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. However, the owner of the strategy, i.e. the aggressor, by keeping the threshold of impunity as high as possible and decreasing the willingness of the defender, can maintain his Hybrid Warfare at a diplomatically feasible level; so the model of the capacity, willingness and threshold, as proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone and Gunneriusson (2016), remains critical to comprehend Hybrid Warfare. Its dynamicity is able to capture the evanescent, blurring line between Hybrid Warfare and Conventional Warfare. In such contest time is the critical factor: this because it is hard to foreseen for the aggressor how long he can keep up with such strategy without risking either the retaliation from the International Community or the depletion of resources across its own DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT spectrum. Similar discourse affects the defender: if he isn\u2019t able to cope with Hybrid Threats (i.e. taking no action), time works against him; if he is, he can start to develop counter narrative and address physical countermeasures. However, this can lead, in the medium long period, to an unforeseen (both for the attacker and the defender) escalation into a large, conventional, armed conflict. The performance of operations that required more than kinetic effects drove the development of DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models and in turn this drive the development of Human Social Culture Behavior Modelling (HCSB), which should stand at the core of the Hybrid Warfare modelling and simulation efforts. Multi Layers models are fundamental to evaluate Strategies and Support Decisions: currently there are favourable conditions to implement models of Hybrid Warfare, such as Dies Irae, SIMCJOH and TREX, in order to further develop tools and war-games for studying new tactics, execute collective training and to support decisions making and analysis planning. The proposed approach is based on the idea to create a mosaic made by HLA interoperable simulators able to be combined as tiles to cover an extensive part of the Hybrid Warfare, giving the users an interactive and intuitive environment based on the \u201cModelling interoperable Simulation and Serious Game\u201d (MS2G) approach. From this point of view, the impressive capabilities achieved by IA-CGF in human behavior modeling to support population simulation as well as their native HLA structure, suggests to adopt them as core engine in this application field. However, it necessary to highlight that, when modelling DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT domains, the researcher has to be aware of the bias introduced by the fact that especially Political and Social \u201cscience\u201d are accompanied and built around value judgement. From this perspective, the models proposed by Cayirci, Bruzzone, Guinnarson (2016) and by Balaban & Mileniczek (2018) are indeed a courageous tentative to import, into the domain of particularly poorly understood phenomena (social, politics, and to a lesser degree economics - Hartley, 2016), the mathematical and statistical instruments and the methodologies employed by the pure, hard sciences. Nevertheless, just using the instruments and the methodology of the hard sciences it is not enough to obtain the objectivity, and is such aspect the representations of Hybrid Warfare mechanics could meet their limit: this is posed by the fact that they use, as input for the equations that represents Hybrid Warfare, not physical data observed during a scientific experiment, but rather observation of the reality that assumes implicitly and explicitly a value judgment, which could lead to a biased output. Such value judgement it is subjective, and not objective like the mathematical and physical sciences; when this is not well understood and managed by the academic and the researcher, it can introduce distortions - which are unacceptable for the purpose of the Science - which could be used as well to enforce a narrative mainstream that contains a so called \u201ctruth\u201d, which lies inside the boundary of politics rather than Science. Those observations around subjectivity of social sciences vs objectivity of pure sciences, being nothing new, suggest however the need to examine the problem under a new perspective, less philosophical and more leaned toward the practical application. The suggestion that the author want make here is that the Verification and Validation process, in particular the methodology used by Professor Bruzzone in doing V&V for SIMCJOH (2016) and the one described in the Modelling & Simulation User Risk Methodology (MURM) developed by Pandolfini, Youngblood et all (2018), could be applied to evaluate if there is a bias and the extent of the it, or at least making clear the value judgment adopted in developing the DIMEFIL/PMESII_PT models. Such V&V research is however outside the scope of the present work, even though it is an offspring of it, and for such reason the author would like to make further inquiries on this particular subject in the future. Then, the theoretical discourse around Hybrid Warfare has been completed addressing the need to establish a new discipline, Strategic Engineering, very much necessary because of the current a political and economic environment which allocates diminishing resources to Defense and Homeland Security (at least in Europe). However, Strategic Engineering can successfully address its challenges when coupled with the understanding and the management of the fourth dimension of military and hybrid operations, Time. For the reasons above, and as elaborated by Leonhard and extensively discussed in the present work, addressing the concern posed by Time dimension is necessary for the success of any military or Hybrid confrontation. The SIMCJOH project, examined under the above perspective, proved that the simulator has the ability to address the fourth dimension of military and non-military confrontation. In operations, Time is the most critical factor during execution, and this was successfully transferred inside the simulator; as such, SIMCJOH can be viewed as a training tool and as well a dynamic generator of events for the MEL/MIL execution during any exercise. In conclusion, SIMCJOH Project successfully faces new challenging aspects, allowed to study and develop new simulation models in order to support decision makers, Commanders and their Staff. Finally, the question posed by Leonhard in terms of recognition of the importance of time management of military operations - nowadays Hybrid Conflict - has not been answered yet; however, the author believes that Modelling and Simulation tools and techniques can represent the safe \u201ctank\u201d where innovative and advanced scientific solutions can be tested, exploiting the advantage of doing it in a synthetic environment

Forecasting Effects of Influence Operations: A Generative Social Science Methodology

Simulation enables analysis of social systems that would be difficult or unethical to experiment upon directly. Agent-based models have been used successfully in the field of generative social science to discover parsimonious sets of factors that generate social behavior. This methodology provides an avenue to explore the spread of anti-government sentiment in populations and to compare the effects of potential Military Information Support Operations (MISO) actions. This research develops an agent-based model to investigate factors that affect the growth of rebel uprisings in a notional population. It adds to the civil violence model developed by Epstein (2006) by enabling communication between agents in the manner of a genetic algorithm and friendships based on shared beliefs. A designed experiment is performed. Additionally, two counter-propaganda strategies are compared and explored. Analysis identifies factors that have effects that can explain some real-world observations, and provides a methodology for MISO operators to compare the effectiveness of potential actions

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2014 Annual Conference:Human Factors in high reliability industries

On the occasion of the 2014 Meeting in Lisbon, Portuga

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2014 Annual Conference:Human Factors in high reliability industries

On the occasion of the 2014 Meeting in Lisbon, Portuga

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2014 Annual Conference:Human Factors in high reliability industries

On the occasion of the 2014 Meeting in Lisbon, Portuga