Operational Innovation & Information
DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS INFORMED BY SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT
The Operational Innovation and Information (OI2) Division brings together experts from several fields, including linguistics, psychology, and computational social sciences, to innovate operational solutions and model the complexities of human motivations and behavior in the global information environment in collaboration with other divisions.
This expertise guides decision-making, enhances operational effectiveness, and supports national security.
Capabilities
Employing advanced modeling techniques to examine human decision-making (individually and in groups), model human and technical networks, and simulate knowledge acquisition, allowing national security strategies to anticipate and defeat adversaries effectively. Includes wargaming, tabletop exercises, and large agent based models.
Studying human reactions in diverse environments (cultural, linguistic, technical, etc.), including cyber contexts, to inform training and develop operational concepts to create decision advantage. Applied expertise in across a wide range of human factors to enable U.S. government efforts to confound, confuse, disrupt, and defeat adversaries.
Accelerate the adoption of commercial intelligence solutions by developing test and evaluation concepts and aligning evaluations with DoW and Intelligence Community standards, to ensure delivery of secure, transformational solutions to the U.S. government.
Dissecting communication patterns by utilizing natural language processing and linguistic analysis to provide insights into cultural and contextual factors to provide an advantage for intelligence and military operations. Also, identifying key signals via multilingual text analysis.
Developing human-focused performance metrics that facilitate data-first strategies for intelligence and improve test and evaluation of advanced technology. Develop training programs that improve mission outcomes and operational readiness.
Mission Areas
Information Warfare
ARLIS’s Information Warfare Mission Area helps government partners understand and operate in complex information environments. The team evaluates emerging technologies, tests commercial capabilities, and develops tools that support faster insight, stronger decisions, and responses to adversarial influence. A key effort is the Information Competition Simulator (ICS), a platform for testing messaging strategies, studying how narratives spread, and assessing population responses. This work supports digital twin modeling, targeted messaging analysis, disinformation identification, and course-of-action evaluation.
National Foreign Language Center
The NFLC@ARLIS mission area develops and delivers innovative solutions for language training, assessment, cross-cultural immersion, and linguistic analysis. The NFLC@ARLIS helps U.S. military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities rapidly acquire language, culture, and human behavior skills through curriculum design and course delivery.
Open-Source Intelligence
ARLIS’s OSINT Mission Area helps government partners use publicly and commercially available information to improve awareness, analysis, and decision-making. The team explores emerging OSINT tools, including AI and ML enabled capabilities, and works with government, industry, and academic partners to strengthen collection, analysis, and collaboration. Its work includes testing vendor capabilities, building OSINT prototypes, developing quick-turn research insights, supporting indications and warning, and analyzing supply chains, regions, and adversaries.