Silverman, Barry G
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Publication Crowd Simulation Incorporating Agent Psychological Models, Roles and Communication(2005-11-24) Silverman, Barry G; Badler, Norman I; Pelechano, Nuria; O'Brien, KevinWe describe a new architecture to integrate a psychological model into a crowd simulation system in order to obtain believable emergent behaviors. Our existing crowd simulation system (MACES) performs high level wayfinding to explore unknown environments and obtain a cognitive map for navigation purposes, in addition to dealing with low level motion within each room based on social forces. Communication and roles are added to achieve individualistic behaviors and a realistic way to spread information about the environment. To expand the range of realistic human behaviors, we use a system (PMFserv) that implements human behavior models from a range of ability, stress, emotion, decision theoretic and motivation sources. An architecture is proposed that combines and integrates MACES and PMFserv to add validated agent behaviors to crowd simulations.Publication Satisfying the Perceived Need for Free-Play in Pedagogically Oriented Interactive Dramas(2003-05-08) Silverman, Barry G; Johns, Michael; Weaver, RansomThis research explores ways of harnessing people's passion for entertainment in order to stimulate players to attain the meta-learning skills they need for lifelong learning and to reach the highest level of learning, that of learning by teaching. More specifically to keep up with today's pace of training and the goal for it to be just-intime, we are interested in creating a game generator to empower grass roots experts to share their stories in such a way that others learn the lessons by engagement and empathy with the storyworld characters. Doing so requires us to address the fundamental issue that caused the entertainment and educational gaming communities to split: that it is not easy to create something fun while constrained by rigid pedagogical goals. We examine a case study of the attempts of one cross-disciplinary team to overcome aesthetic silos, and propose a critical systems methodology and generator that harness the core mechanics that make gaming fun, while providing an accessible means for educators to create content to deliver the educational payload.Publication How Emotions and Personality Effect the Utility of Alternative Decisions: A Terrorist Target Selection Case Study(2001-05-01) Johns, Michael; Silverman, Barry GThe role of emotion modeling in the development of computerized agents has long been unclear. This is partially due to instability in the philosophical issues of the problem as psychologists struggle to build models for their own purposes, and partially due to the often-wide gap between these theories and that which can be implemented by an agent author. This paper describes an effort to use emotion models in part as a deep model of utility for use in decision theoretic agents. This allows for the creation of simulated forces capable of balancing a great deal of competing goals, and in doing so they behave, for better or for worse, in a more realistic manner.Publication Socio-Cultural Games for Training and Analysis(2007-01-01) Silverman, Barry G; Bharathy, Gnana K; Johns, Michael; Eidelson, Roy J; Smith, Tony E; Nye, BenjaminThis paper presents a theory for role playing simulation games intended to support analysts (and trainees) with generating and testing alternative competing hypotheses on how to influence world conflict situations. Simulated leaders and followers capable of playing these games are implemented in a cognitive modeling framework, called PMFserv, which covers value systems, personality and cultural factors, emotions, relationships, perception, stress/coping style and decision making. Of direct interest, as Section 1.1 explains, is codification and synthesis of best-of-breed social science models within PMFserv to improve the internal validity of the agent implementations. Sections 2 and 3 present this for leader profiling instruments and group membership decision-making, respectively. Section 4 then offers two real world case studies (The Third Crusade and SE Asia today) where the agent models are subjected to Turing and correspondence tests under each case study. In sum, substantial effort on game realism, best-of-breed social science models, and agent validation efforts is essential if analysis and training tools are to help explore cultural issues and alternative ways to influence outcomes. Such exercises, in turn, are likely to improve the state of the science as well.Publication Modeling the Personality & Cognition of Leaders(2005-05-16) Silverman, Barry G; Bharathy, Gnana KThis paper summarizes efforts at adapting a personality profiling framework to model behavior and choices of political and military leaders. This is part of a larger project to create a role-playing, decision-making game to allow you to play out scenarios of interest against other leaders. In this modeling exercise we implement the Hermann leader personality profile tool to create historic leaders (Saladin, Richard I, etc.). We then attempt to validate the leader agents against scenarios of the 3rd Crusade.Publication A Systems Approach to Healthcare: Agent-based Modeling, Community Mental Health, and Population Well-being(2014-09-13) Silverman, Barry G.; Bharathy, Gnana K.; Hanrahan, Nancy; Gordon, Kim; Johnson, DanPurpose Explore whether agent-based modeling and simulation can help healthcare administrators discover interventions that increase population wellness and quality of care while, simultaneously, decreasing costs. Since important dynamics often lie in the social determinants outside the health facilities that provide services, this study thus models the problem at three levels (individuals, organizations, and society). Methods The study explores the utility of translating an existing (prize winning) software for modeling complex societal systems and agent's daily life activities (like a Sim City style of software), into a desired decision support system. A case study tests if the 3 levels of system modeling approach is feasible, valid, and useful. The case study involves an urban population with serious mental health and Philadelphia's Medicaid population (n = 527,056), in particular. Results Section 3 explains the models using data from the case study and thereby establishes feasibility of the approach for modeling a real system. The models were trained and tuned using national epidemiologic datasets and various domain expert inputs. To avoid co-mingling of training and testing data, the simulations were then run and compared (Section 4.1) to an analysis of 250,000 Philadelphia patient hospital admissions for the year 2010 in terms of re-hospitalization rate, number of doctor visits, and days in hospital. Based on the Student t-test, deviations between simulated vs. real world outcomes are not statistically significant. Validity is thus established for the 2008–2010 timeframe. We computed models of various types of interventions that were ineffective as well as 4 categories of interventions (e.g., reduced per-nurse caseload, increased check-ins and stays, etc.) that result in improvement in well-being and cost. Conclusions The 3 level approach appears to be useful to help health administrators sort through system complexities to find effective interventions at lower costs.Publication Validating Agent Based Social Systems Models(2010-12-05) Bharathy, Gnana K.; Silverman, Barry GValidating social systems is not a trivial task. The paper outlines some of our past efforts in validating models of social systems with cognitively detailed agents. It also presents some of the challenges faced by us. A social system built primarily of cognitively detailed agents can provide multiple levels of correspondence, both at observable and abstract aggregated levels. Such a system can also pose several challenges including large feature spaces, issues in information elicitation with database, experts and news feeds, counterfactuals, fragmented theoretical base, and limited funding for validation. Our own approach to validity assessment is to consider the entire life cycle and assess the validity under four broad dimensions of methodological validity, internal validity, external validity and qualitative, causal and narrative validity. In the past, we have employed a triangulation of multiple validation techniques, including face validation as well as formal validation tests including correspondence testing.Publication StateSim: Lessons Learned from 20 Years of A Country Modeling and Simulation Toolset(2020-01-01) Silverman, Barry G; Silverman, Daniel M; Bharathy, Gnana; Weyer, Nathan; Tam, WilliamA holy grail for military, diplomatic, and intelligence analysis is a valid set of software agent models that act as the desired ethno-political factions so that one can test the effects of alternative courses of action in different countries. This article explains StateSim, a country modeling approach that synthesizes best-of-breed theories from across the social sciences and that has helped numerous organizations over 20 years to study insurgents, gray zone actors, and other societal instabilities. The country modeling literature is summarized (Sect 1.1) and synthetic inquiry is contrasted with scientific inquiry (Sect. 1.2 and 2). Section 2 also explains many fielded StateSim applications and 100s of past acceptability tests and validity assessments. Section 3 then describes how users now construct and run ‘first pass’ country models within hours due to the StateSim Generator, while Section 4 offers two country analyses that illustrate this approach. The conclusions explain lessons learned.Publication Affordances in AI(2012-01-01) Nye, Benjamin D.; Silverman, Barry GAffordances in AI refer to a design methodology for creating artificial intelligence systems that are designed to perceive their environment in terms of its affordances (Sahin et al. 2007). Affordances in AI are adapted from affordances introduced in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by James J. Gibson (1979). Design methodologies in the applied sciences use affordances to represent potential actions that exist as a relationship between an agent and its environment. This approach to artificial intelligence is designed for autonomous agents, making it suitable for robotics and simulation.Publication HOLON/CADSE: Integrating Open Software Standards and Formal Methods to Generate Guideline-Based Decision Support Agents(1999) Silverman, Barry G; Wong, Alex; Lang, Lance; Tannen, Val; Khoury, Allan; Campbell, Keith; Sahuguet, Arnaud; Qiang, ChenThis paper describes the efforts of a consortium that is trying to develop and validate formal methods and a meta-environment for authoring, checking, and maintaining a large repository of machine executable practice guidelines. The goal is to integrate and extend a number of open software standards so that guidelines in the meta-environment become a resource that any vendor can plug their applications into and run in their proprietary environment provided they conform to the interface standards.