Human Mosaic Systems Blog

Virtual Simulations and Complex Human Dynamics_Human Mosaic Systems, LLC

Video overview of Human Mosaic Systems, LLC's products and services:

  

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBXBgnSTcOw

Who we are

• HMS is a Solution Provider in Second Life that also designs virtual environments with an eye towards the psychology of the avatar, group dynamics, and the virtual space. 
• We help clients navigate Living Human Systems and their complex dynamics through design and facilitation. We focus on the 4 core aspects of Complex Human Systems:
  • Group Dynamics,
  • Building Relationships,
  • Identity, and
  • Storytelling.
• HMS creates powerful immersive environments and teaches individuals interpersonal skills that enable self-organization/ collaboration, and a deeper understanding about their own perspectives or views of reality, as well as those others.
• We build environments that understand the underlying complex human dynamics and help facilitate the building of relationships, facilitate bonding, and greater understanding. All of which helps individuals collaborate as they make decisions in complex ever changing environments.
• HMS provides rich storytelling environments to enable individuals to build community, share perspectives and obtain greater understanding about ourselves and our views of reality. This greater awareness leads to a change in the way we think, impacting our interactions with others.

What we do

• We at Human Mosaic Systems, LLC design immersive environments and provide scalable modules that facilitate communication and group dynamics skills, enabling creativity, self-organization, collaboration, flexibility, and deeper understanding of human dynamics.
  • Our program and builds give people the opportunity
    • to practice their skills,
    • to learn as the environment changes, and
    • to adapt their perspectives and behavior to meet those changes using a scalable learning system and facilitative group process that enables greater understanding of themselves and others, expanding perspectives, and making decisions about how to proceed in an ever changing complex environment.
• In addition, with underpinnings steeped in counseling psychology principles we facilitate complex group dynamics through a simulation process that is scalable and able to help individuals and groups make decisions, develop social networks/relationships, and obtain emotional commitment while working together in complex environments.
  • The Heart of the Process is the self-organizing key found in emergency response situations.
  • It can also be used in a broad array of situations ranging from Project Reviews, Organizational Change, Individual Leadership Coaching, Community Development, to Strategic Leadership.
  • Paired with immersive 3D simulations and/or Storytelling, the process allows participants to gain a deeper kinetic understanding of their views of reality, as well as to understand and accept others' views. The module allows you to add more interactive related simulations to gain deeper understanding of the principles and dynamics at play, as well as an ability to practice what you have learned and reflected upon.

DARPA wants to know how stories influence human behavior _ By Layer 8 on Thu, 02/10/11

 

Link: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/thought-police-darpa-wants-know-how-stories-i

DARPA in a nutshell wants to know about how stories or narratives or whatever might like to call them influence human behavior.  To this end, DARPA is hosting a workshop called "Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts," on Feb. 28^th to discuss the topic. 

"Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency," DARPA stated. "Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so, is a necessity if we are to effectively analyze the security phenomena shaped by stories. Doing this in a scientifically respectable manner requires a working theory of narratives, an understanding of what role narratives play in security contexts, and examination of how to best analyze stories-decomposing them and their psychological impact systematically."

According to DARPA, STORyNET has three goals:

1. To survey narrative theories. These empirically informed theories should tell us something about the nature of stories: what is a story? What are its moving parts? Is there a list of necessary and sufficient conditions it takes for a stimulus to be considered a story instead of something else? Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?

2. To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts. What role do stories play in influencing political violence and to what extent? What function do narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how do they influence a person or group's choice of means (such as violence) to achieve political ends? How do stories influence bystanders' response to conflict? Is it possible to measure how attitudes salient to security issues are shaped by stories?

3. To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools. How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion? What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people? Are particular approaches or tools better than others for understanding how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior?

Whether or not STORyNET goes beyond deep discussions at a workshop remains to be seen, but DARPA is certainly interested in developing such thought machines.  In 2008 it said it wanted to build avant-garde artificial intelligence (AI) software known as a Machine Reading Program (MRP) that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.

For example, all of the text in the World Wide Web will become available for automating the monitoring and analysis of technological and political activities of nations; plans, rhetoric, and activities of transnational organizations; and scientific discovery within various disciplines, DARPA stated. As digitized text from library books becomes available, new avenues of cultural awareness and historical research will be enabled. With truly general techniques for effectively handling the incompatibilities between natural language and the language of formal inference, a system could, in principal, be constructed that maps between natural and formal languages in any subject domain, DARPA said.

DARP also has its Cyber Genome Program it hopes will develop technologies that will help law enforcement types collect, analyze and identify all manner of digital artifacts.

The objective of the four-year program is to produce revolutionary cyber defense and investigatory technologies for the collection, identification, characterization, and presentation of properties and relationships from software, data, and/or users to support law enforcement, counter intelligence, and cyber defense teams, DARPA stated. Such digital artifacts may be collected from computers, personal digital assistants, and/or distributed information systems such as cloud computers, from wired or wireless networks, or collected storage media.  The format may include electronic documents or software to include malware, DARPA stated.

The role of embodiment in student success in virtual worlds by Mark Childs

 

The focus of the study presented here is how learners’ individual experience of virtual worlds contributes to the success or otherwise of virtual worlds as a learning activity, and particularly the role that presence and embodiment play in learning and teaching. It is based on a series of five case studies which ran from 2008 to 2009, with some additional information from learning activities conducted in 2010. These were all at different higher education institutions, across a range of subject disciplines. All took place in Second Life.  Firm conclusions about the role of learners’ experience are difficult to justify, due to the small numbers of students from whom data were gathered (a total of 35 across all the cases). However, (to the extent to which conclusions can be drawn) factors such as institution, subject, sex and age appeared to be less influential than the time spent inworld, and the nature of the activity.

The article here can only present the barest outlines of the work, for the full descriptions of case studies, methodology etc.; the full study is available for download. The work presented here will also form the basis of a keynote at the SOLSTICE conference at Edge Hill University, Liverpool, on 8^th June.  ..........More