A Toolkit for Understanding Social Signals in Local Environments (TUSSLE)

Increasingly, tactical personnel such as CoISTs, are responsible for making qualitative judgments of local conditions, or"atmospherics,"to provide insight to decision-makers in their unit as well as in higher echelons, despite a high op tempo and limited training. Tactical personnel must identify, correlate, and fuse dynamic, sparse sociocultural signals ("weak"signals) hidden within large, disparate data sets to recognize potential social disruptions or threatening conflicts. To help CoIST staff in forecasting alerts from weak sociocultural signals from diverse data, we propose to design and demonstrate a Toolkit for Understanding Sociocultural Signals in Local Environments (TUSSLE). TUSSLE incorporates a wide diversity of data, uses a hybrid approach to modeling that can specifically consider each data type, and expresses its outputs to meet the unique needs of the CoIST. TUSSLE is composed of four main components: (1) an Interactive Data Collection Tool to aid the CoIST in querying the various available sources; (2) a Sociocultural Indicator Measurement Tool to link weak signal observations to higher-order sociocultural meaning; (3) a Sociocultural Visualization Tool to represent results; and, (4) a Forecast Assessment Tool that enables the CoIST to represent and communicate the uncertainty (and the sociocultural context causing that uncertainty) to decision-makers.