Human Social Cultural and Behavioral Sciences (HSBC) Applied Research and Advanced Technology Development

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In 2008 the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) established the Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) Modeling Program. The mission of this six-year program is to research, develop, and transition technologies, tools, and systems that will help operations planners, intelligence analysts, operations analysts, and wargamers represent, understand, and forecast socio-cultural behavior at the strategic, operational and tactical level. The HSCB Program has the following objectives:� Advance understanding of the influence of socio-cultural factors on behavior as it applies to military-relevant contexts and environments, and provide empirically validated theories that can be instantiated in computational models.� Provide new methods and technology, validated computational models, and software to assist warfighters and others in considering socio-cultural behavior factors for analysis, planning, and operations.� Develop methods and tools for flexible delivery of training of socio-cultural knowledge, skills, and abilities at tactical and operational levels.� Develop methods and tools for the collection, generation, standardization, integration, and transfer of socio-cultural data for use in computational models and decision support systemsCutting across all of these objectives is the core goal of the HSCB Program, to support the integration of methods and tools developed into existing systems so as to provide the warfighter with improved capabilities to operate in a varied and dynamic socio-cultural behavior landscape.The four topic areas identified in the BAA support the four objectives above and have been broken out into Applied Research and Advanced Technology Development focus areas; however the topics are not considered to be mutually exclusive and White Papers and proposals that address multiple topics are encouraged.

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