Politics & Foreign Relations

(a subtopic of Applications)

Country Team Advisor. "This is an application of artificial intelligence to the domain of international relations. Our goal is to construct a probabilistic reasoning model based on Bayes net decision modeling, which will help predict or assess country actions and opinions in the context of emerging strategic crises. The model will interface with an existing country team database and provide intelligent automated assistance to country team specialists during the USAWC Strategic Cisis Exercise." Knowledge Engineering Group. Center for Strategic Leadership, United States Army War College.

InfoCitizen: "Agent based negotiation for inter- and intra-enterprise coordination employing an European Information Architecture for Public Administration." (See sidebar for link to this Presentation.)

• Also see this article: Paperwork made simple! ICT Results (August 1, 2007). "A new on-line platform successfully trialed in municipalities in Greece, Spain, Italy, and Germany can save citizens and local authorities time and money in the transfer of paper documents from country to country.Researchers have developed and successfully tested an IT system to help put European public administrations on the same page in dealing with laborious cross-border information exchange. The aim was to find a better solution for public authorities working across different countries, to simplify the moving process for citizens.The new software system and tools replace paper-based procedures and allow electronic documents to be retrieved from and distributed to any public administration connected to a network, efficiently and securely.... The partners in the European project, called InfoCitizen, succeeded on both the technological and organisational sides, suggests the coordinator Dirk Werth of the Institute for Information Systems at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken. 'We proved that it is possible to create a citizen-friendly public space!'"

Kosmix Plays Politics With Search. By Seán Captain. Wired News (March 7, 2006). "In light of the recent row over Google and Yahoo doing business in China, many people are concerned with the politics of web searching. But one company is turning its attention to the web searching of politics. Search engine newcomer Kosmix, which lets users look in specific topic areas, recently introduced its politics engine. For any search term, Kosmix organizes results into conservative, liberal or libertarian categories, allowing seekers to explore results associated with a certain political persuasion."

Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle With Private Effort on Voter Information, Ickes and Soros Challenge Dean and DNC. By Thomas B. Edsall. The Washington Post (March 8, 2006; page A01) and washingtonpost.com. "A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in using technology for political advantage. ... Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of data available from government files and consumer marketing firms -- as well as the party's own surveys -- to better target potential supporters. ... The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach...."

Find Your Presidential Dreamboat. By Louise Witt. Wired News (November 2, 2004). "On your way to the poll and still undecided? Maybe a new online artificial intelligence program, Presidential Guidester, can help you decide for whom to pull the lever. Think of it as a Match.com that pairs voters with their ideal presidential candidate. Working with the pollster Zogby International, Decidia Decision Systems created software that matches voters' main concerns with the candidate who other likely voters believe will best address them. ... Decidia, whose corporate clients include Sharp Electronics, Whirlpool and Lexmark International, plans to apply the same technology to help consumers buy products."

• Visit Decidia Decision Systems and see How It Works.

Terror Games - Can computer games be devised to model the thinking and predict the actions of allies, enemies and even terrorists? Some in the U.S. government think so. Are they playing God? By Jeffrey Rothfeder. Popular Science (February 2004). "Virtual Pakistan is part of an emerging programming discipline called agent-based modeling.... The Pentagon needs 21st-century analytical tools to replace the outmoded war games of yore, which, despite improvements in computer power, are still one-dimensional, culturally blinkered and of small use in devising strategies for so-called asymmetric warfare in a world of Afghanistans, Iraqs, al Qaedas, smart bombs, Predators and the threat of bioterror. And so it has earmarked well over $100 million to determine whether the agent-based models produced by [Ian] Lustick and others can advance the strategic game."

Will Mario fold under pressure in 'Paper' sequel? Here's a closer look at what's making headlines in the world of interactive entertainment. By Marc Saltzman. USA Today (August 31, 2004). "Game of the Week: The Political Machine. ... Securing the most Electoral College votes is the goal of this lighthearted and timely simulation. You can choose to represent George W. Bush or John Kerry, or other contemporary or historical political figures.... You play against the computer's artificial intelligence or log onto the Internet for multiplayer matches."

Game plays politics with your PC. By Alfred Hermida. BBC (September 3, 2003). "Republic is a strategy simulation game that puts you in the role of a budding revolutionary, out to overthrow a despotic and corrupt regime. Much of the artificial intelligence in the game is based on the book, Crowds and Power, by the 1981 Nobel Laureate in Literature. ... 'I wanted the player to feel what it was like to be Che Guevara,' explained Demis Hassabis, the creator of Republic, 'to evoke those emotions in a player.' The title crosses traditional genres, combining elements of real-time strategy games with simulation games like SimCity. ... The game makers spent a lot of time trying to work out how to convey complex political ideology to gamers. 'I read a lot of revolutionary books during the making of the game, in particular Crowds and Power,' said Mr Hassabis, 'it looks at issues of mob role and power.' ... Elixir [Studios] are even talking to academics about how the artificial intelligence behind the game could be used for research purposes."

Government Watchdog - Software That Sniffs. By Rebecca Fairley Raney. The New York Times [July 4, 2002 (no-fee reg. req'd)]. "The software, called Minutes-N-Motion, applies artificial intelligence to the problem of finding needles in the haystacks of government documents. While standard document-searching software can pinpoint keywords, Mr. [Murray] Craig's program makes connections to draw conclusions on issues like whether a public official may have acted on a matter presenting a conflict of interest."

• also see: Document Reading Made Easy - A new software might help journalists sort through reams of documents in minutes. By Rebecca Fairley Raney. Online Journalism Review (July 2, 2002).
• and: Politicos take note - Voters are watching. By Steve Tanner. Silicon Valley Business Ink (October 4, 2002). "Ever wonder how a local city council member's affiliations affect his or her policy decisions? If so, a new online service promises to make such information more accessible. Effective Oct. 1, users can view voting histories of elected officials in a dozen Bay Area cities using a new Web-based service by Aliso Viej--based software company eNeuralNet Inc. (www.minutes-n-motion.com). The Bay Area is the first region where the service is being deployed. Minutes-n-Motion, available for $9.95 per month, consists of a constantly refreshed database of the minutes from city council meetings and a proprietary artificial intelligence search engine. ... [Murray] Craig, and others familiar with Minutes-n-Motion, insist a database without a high-powered search tool is virtually useless. The major drawback of systems already in place is that making sense of the data is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, says Mike Shires, assistant professor at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy in Malibu."

Can Computers Decide? By Roger C. Schank. iMP/Information Impacts Magazine. (March 2001) / now available from KurzweilAI.net. "[Case-based reasoning] systems could get good enough so that you might want a computer decision maker to decide U.S. foreign policy. What a terrible idea, say the scoffers. But, real decision makers reason from cases too and sometimes they make profound case-based errors (my favorite being the use of the Pueblo incident as a precedent to help President Ford decide what to do in the Mayaguez incident -- a match that only made sense because both involved Spanish-named ships). A computer would presumably be more consistent, less liable to emotion and stress, more mindful of historical precedent, more generally knowledgeable of prior cases and much less likely to have had a bad night's sleep or a fight with its wife."

• Also in this issue of iMP: What if the Computers don't Make Decisions, but Help Make Decisions? By Helen Whyte. "In making decisions about our communities' future, as in planting the garden, we will, of course, use all of the useful tools we can find. And the computer is shaping up to be the best planning tool since the pencil was invented. Indeed, it is the tool that links the information age with participatory democracy, providing, we believe, exactly the support that citizens need to make the right decisions about their future."
  • "CommunityViz [the centerpiece of Helen Whyte's article above] is a suite of software tools being developed by The Orton Family Foundation designed to assist communities with spatial decision-making and analysis of land-use scenarios. ... Policy Simulator allows users to predict and examine the possible long-term outcomes of proposed land-use alternatives or policy actions by utilizing 'adaptive agent-based modeling' to simulate the behavior and interactions of many individuals or agents."

Seeing Around Corners. By Jonathan Rauch. The Atlantic (April 2002). "The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail -- but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work."

• Also from John Mallery: Crisis Early Warning and International Conflict Management. "This Web page seeks to centralize pointers concerning the application of computational methods to understanding international relations. Computational methods are understood as artificial intelligence techniques, including machine learning and computational linguistics. In the broad field of international relations, we emphasize here international (and subnational) conflict processes as well as efforts to mediate or manage conflict."

For Basques, the Net May Be Key to Violence-Free Vote. By Barry James. International Herald Tribune. (May 4, 2001). "Electronic voting is not unique to Spain. Experiments are being conducted in many countries, including the United States. What makes the situation different in Spain is the intimidation of a society cowed by terrorism. ... Software companies already are working on voting programs aimed at enabling citizens to cast electronic votes while ensuring their anonymity. A project called Parlamento Ciudanano, or Citizens' Parliament, has been devised by experts in cryptography and artificial intelligence at the government's Higher Center for Scientific Investigations."

Political Science: Artificial Intelligence Applications. By Gavan Duffy and Seth A. Tucker. Reprinted from Social Science Computing Review Spring, 1995. "Political science and artificial intelligence are both 'sciences of the artificial,' in the apt phrase of political scientist and AI pioneer Herbert Simon (1981). They both concern themselves with artifice, or intentional effects of human actors. ... We have sought in this essay ... to provide something more than a simple literature review. We hope that we have imparted a sense of the variety and innovative spirit that characterizes the nascent tradition we describe."