Cognitive Security
The Cognitive Security mission area has capabilities for online and offline influence campaigns in the information environment, and for protecting against malign influence by foreign adversaries.
ARLIS supports the strategic control of the information environment, particularly online and offline influence at scales ranging from individuals to large societies, by addressing the unique challenges of Operations in the Information Environment. ARLIS takes an interdisciplinary approach to conduct targeted and overarching research on a range of OIE activities using computational social science, social media, language, culture, modeling, simulation and wargaming.
ARLIS leads in the cutting-edge advancement of generative artificial intelligence, natural language processing assessment, and measuring campaign effectiveness, making it unique from other research centers. ARLIS has designed online systems allowing interactions within simulated and real-world populations to better understand malign influence and its effect on cognitive security. ARLIS tools can detect and mitigate targeted attempts to influence government insiders.
Project
Social media evokes a spectrum of emotions from anger to love, all of which could be quantified except one: the feeling experienced after seeing something cute. ARLIS researchers found a way to measure cute content.
As part of the Emotions in Social Media project, funded by the Minerva Research Initiative and the Office of Naval Research, the first part of the project studied various emotions’ impact on content sharing in Polish and Lithuanian socio-political social media, including nuanced emotions like cute/kama muta, defined as heart warming.
This study shed light on the complex relationship between emotions and social media sharing and offered valuable insights for understanding user behavior on social platforms. It suggested that specific emotions play a crucial role in determining whether a post will be shared, and this understanding can have implications for social media strategies and content creation.