You are here

Culturally and Socially Aware Believable Agents (CASABA)

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Army
Contract: W31P4Q-10-C-0087
Agency Tracking Number: O092-HS2-6021
Amount: $99,795.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: OSD09-HS2
Solicitation Number: 2009.2
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2009
Award Year: 2010
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2010-03-05
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2010-10-08
Small Business Information
625 Mount Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
DUNS: 115243701
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Peter Weyhrauch
 Senior Scientist
 (617) 491-3474
 pweyhrauch@cra.com
Business Contact
 Ninos Hanna
Title: Contract Specialist
Phone: (617) 491-3474
Email: nhanna@cra.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

Stability operations often require junior leaders and Warfighters with limited experience to interact and communicate personally and effectively with people whose cultures, languages, lifestyle, and beliefs are very different from those found in the U.S. It has become increasingly clear that strategy, operational plans, and implementing procedures must occur in the context of local cultural constraints to be effective. We propose to develop easy-to-use tools for creating virtual environments for socio-cultural training applications, including CGFs which can generate behavior and interpret their surroundings (including the trainee and his actions) based on realistic, nuanced cultural behavior models that are updated in real-time based on real-world data sources. We propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of Culturally And Socially Aware Believable Agents (CASABA), a tool for rapidly creating socially and culturally realistic virtual agents for immersive cultural training applications that dynamically adapt to the changing cultural environment. CASABA can deliver the required immersive cultural training to warfighters both before deployment as well as during deployment to best prepare Warfighters for mission success across a full spectrum of operations and cultures.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

US Flag An Official Website of the United States Government