Conversation Analysis of Coalition Communication in Network Centric Operations

Team verbal communication is a central component of coalition operations. Investigating the nature of (mis)communication in coalition operations, we conducted analyses based on both natural discourse data recorded during mission execution exercises, and the data collected through interviews of experienced coalition personnel. The authors’ analyses shows that pragmatic aspects of language use are essential parameters to successful understanding of communication threads, which demonstrate the ineffectiveness of purely semantic-similarity-based approaches to conversational data. This analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current computational approaches such as Latent Semantic Analysis as a methodology for analyzing conversational discourse. As a result, the authors propose a computational framework that incorporates both LSA and computational pragmatics for automating the analysis of coalition communication to support the concept of network-centric operations.

Cultural Network Analysis

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a rigorous, end-to-end methodology for modeling culture as networks of ideas that are distributed among members of a population. The method, Cultural Network Analysis (CNA), represents an interdisciplinary synthesis of techniques drawn from the fields of cognitive anthropology, cultural and cognitive psychology, naturalistic decision making, and decision analysis. CNA is used to develop cultural models for groups and populations, typically depicted as a network representation of the culturally shared concepts, causal beliefs, and values that influence key decisions. CNA can be usefully employed for a variety of applications, including the design of tools to support multinational collaborative planning and decision making, the development of situated cultural training programs, and characterizing the cognition of target audiences to support strategic communications campaigns.

The Network-Extended Mind

Whereas the traditional view in cognitive science has been to view mind and cognition as something that is the result of essentially inner, neural processes, the extended cognition perspective claims that at least some human mental states and processes stem from complex webs of causal influence involving extra-neural resources, most notably the resources of our social and technological environments. In this chapter the authors explore the possibility that contemporary and near-future network systems are poised to extend and perhaps transform our human cognitive potential. They also examine the extent to which the information and network sciences are relevant to their understanding of various forms of cognitive extension, particularly with respect to the formation, maintenance and functioning of extended cognitive systems in network-enabled environments. Their claim is that the information and network sciences are relevant on two counts: firstly, they support an understanding of the mechanisms underpinning socially- and technologically-mediated forms of cognitive extension; secondly, they serve to guide and inform engineering efforts that strive to enhance and expand our cognitive capabilities. The authors discuss the relevance and applicability of these conclusions to current and future research exploring the contribution of network technologies to military coalition operations.

A Model for Culturally Adaptive Policy Management in Ad Hoc Collaborative Contexts

In this chapter, the authors consider an approach to advancing the value of context-sensitive policy management technology for collaborative mission planning and execution through integration of algorithms based on cultural models and collaborative decision making. Three research teams collaborated to leverage their research frameworks and results in policy lifecycle management, cultural analysis, and decision support in this effort. The chapter describes the three technical areas, and the results of a theoretical analysis of the potential value of their integration in a new perspective, combined with a set of research questions that might be addressed in further inquiry in this new area. The theoretical work identifies opportunities for addressing challenging issues in policy, culture, and collaborative decision making. The authors conclude with a view of future research that might provide a breakthrough in this intersection of disciplines and lead to the creation of a culturally aware policy management system for collaborative activities.

Graph Mining Techniques for Networking Applications

Computer networks are inherently graphical in structure, since they contain multiple geographically distributed nodes, which are connected by communication links. In many cases, such as large military networks, this also leads to a network-centric view of the data. This naturally leads to an information network representation of the data. In information networks, the nodes represent the different elements of information, and the links represent the logical relationships between them. An even higher layer of logical organization is a social network, in which the nodes correspond to the different entities in the network, and the links correspond to the interactions. The common element among the different kinds of networks which are encountered in practical network-centric representation of the data is that they can all be represented in the form of a structural graph. This structural behavior can be used in order to glean different kinds of practical insights. This chapter will provide an overview of these different graph mining techniques and their applications to the various kinds of networks.

Policies to Enable Secure Dynamic Community Establishment

Many coalition operations require the establishment of secure communities across the different networks that make up a coalition network. These communities are formed dynamically in order to achieve the goals of a specific mission, and frequently consist of mobile entities interconnected into a mobile ad-hoc network. Technologies are needed to create these communities, and manage their operations. In this chapter, the authors show how a framework for self-managed cells can be extended to provide this capability for coalition operations.

Policy Technologies for Federation and Interoperation of Coalition Networks

The salient characteristic of a coalition network is that two networks that may have evolved independently are brought together for a common operation. Dynamic communities of interests need to be established among the two networks, and establishing such communities requiring federating the assets and resources available in the disparate networks that make up the coalition. Each coalition partner may have guidelines restricting the operating conditions for working with other partners, and sharing information with the other partners. This chapter presents a life-cycle for policy management in the context of coalition operations which can be used to federate different information assets in a coalition, and allow improved interoperability among different constituents of the network.

Quality of Sensor-Originated Information in Coalition Information Networks

Coalition operations greatly benefit from the exchange of information collected from a plethora of wirelessly communicating sensors deployed in the theater of operation. However, to make judicious use of this information and then act effectively based on this information, knowledge of its quality, and a common means of expressing and communicating this quality are necessary. This chapter considers quality of information (QoI) for sensor networks starting with building a definition of QoI from first principles and by exploiting industry efforts to define quality in other domains, notably quality of service. The definition touches upon two complementary yet distinct aspects of quality: (a) the inherent quality attributes that characterize information; and (b) the assessment of these attributes within the context of applications utilizing the information, referred as the value of information (VoI). It then discusses information as a service and the various QoI viewpoints that associate sensor-originated information providers with sensor-enabled applications in dynamic coalition environments. Then, information processors and operators are introduced, which are functional modules in end-to-end systems that process information based on the QoI attributes. Finally, a data model for QoI metadata, describing the QoI attributes, is presented. The data model provides a common means to describe and communicate QoI attributes among information processors. It enables the indexing and searching of the most pertinent information, of desired quality, and information sources and the on-demand binding of applications to sources that is necessary to support operations in multiparty coalitions.

Policy Technologies for Security Management in Coalition Networks

The goal of policy-based security management is to enable military personnel to specify security requirements in terms of simple, intuitive goals. These goals are translated into the concrete system settings in a way that the system behaves in a consistent and desirable way. This technology minimizes the technical expertise required by military personnel and automates security management while allowing a high level control by the human in the loop. This chapter describes a framework for managing security policies, and an overview of two prototypes that simplify different aspects of policy management in the context of coalition operations.

Security across Disparate Management Domains in Coalition MANETs

Designing a coalition network for chaotic environments (e.g., responding to a large catastrophe) is challenging because such systems cannot rely on availability of a fixed communication or a security infrastructure. In such situations, a coalition may use Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) to communicate and to extend its operational reach and tempo. In this scenario, bootstrapping security and networking protocols requires that networking protocols cannot assume full existence of operational security protocols and vice-versa. In this chapter, the authors outline a realistic bounded resource adversary model and examine bootstrapping problems in the physical & link layer and the routing layer with the goal of identifying new research challenges and novel solution methodologies. In particular, (i) the authors examine secure link key set up protocols at the physical & link layer that neither use computationally intensive PKI mechanisms nor assume pre-configured shared keys between nodes that belong to different coalition partners, (ii) identify new security issues owing to power saving intra-domain routing protocols that use sophisticated packet matching and forwarding mechanisms; in a coalition setting they also examine inter-domain routing protocols that preserve domain autonomy and yet permits scalable network monitoring and misbehavior detection, (iii) examine identity management issues in MANETs and outline a wireless fingerprinting approach to condone a malicious node from spoofing and forging one or more identities on the network.