STO-Activities: (no title)

Activity title: Technology Enablers and Force Multipliers for CogWar: From Monitoring and Assessment to AI-based Assistance and Automation systems
Activity Reference: HFM-373
Panel: HFM
Security Classification: NATO UNCLASSIFIED
Status: Active
Activity type: RTG
Start date: 2024-02-05T00:00:00Z
Actual End date: 2027-02-05T00:00:00Z
Keywords: Cognition, Cognitive Warfare, Enhancement, Ethics, Human Performance, Neuroscience, Physiological Monitoring, Trust, Warfighter
Background: The future operational environment will be dynamic and complex, a constantly contested, boundless, persistent, and cross-domain battlespace from seabed to space and from the cyber realm to cognitive frontiers.
Cognitive Warfare (CogWar) is an emerging multi-domain field that leverages human and machine cognition to gain advantages over adversaries by preserving and augmenting the cognition of friendly forces while degrading that of adversaries. Manipulating human understanding, perspectives, and behaviours can shape military, political, or social environments in favour of one’s strategic objectives. Moreover, it is imperative to protect our own forces from similar influence from adversaries.
CogWar is a strategy that focuses on altering cognitive processes, and consequently, actions. For friendly forces, this manifests as enhanced performance and better decision-making. Boosted by digital ecosystems, new technologies, and advances in neuroscience and social cybersecurity that enable novel Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP), CogWar capabilities are likely to expand even further.
Considering the potential opportunities, threats, implications, and impact of CogWar on NATO, it is imperative that NATO develops and maintains a collective capacity to resist and mitigate the impact of adversarial CogWar on its member countries, while obtaining capabilities and procedures to act on or react to CogWar, if needed.
Objectives: - Use Space: What are initial attack or defence vectors and use cases that should be used as a starting point to analyse technological enablers?
- Effect Space: What are cognitive states of interest (e.g., uncertainty, confusion) that lead to susceptibility to cognitive infiltration (informed partially by other ET/RTG from pillar “Cognitive Effects”)
- Design Space: Which are potential technological enablers on each sociotechnical layer of a nested defence system? What are the most promising paths for countermeasures and defences against adversary CogWar technologies and methods on each of these layers? Example for enablers are
o HMI technology to inform warfighters about CogWar threats, operator status, and connect artificial and human cognitive agents
o AI-based decision aids and automation systems for CogWar defence
o Sensor technologies to inform about the human cognitive state, e.g., warfighters, teams, coalition partners, and influenced populations
o Sensor and detection systems to identify cognitive attacks
o AI technology to generate artificial cognition for defending against cognitive attacks
o Methods for Human-Autonomy Teaming
o Network technology to connect different cognitive agents in a defence system
- Systemic Aspects:
o What are the most important feedback loops in our nested defence systems, connecting
? Human-machine systems
? System-of-System
? Organization
? Societies
o What is an efficient taxonomy of current CogWar technologies, methods, and defences?
o What critical knowledge gaps do we have for near- and mid-term advances in CogWar augmentation and defence
- Connections to other pillars of CogWar: How are these enablers systemically connected to the other pillars of CogWar and their related issues, especially to
o Situation Awareness/Sense Making
o Cognitive Effects
o Modus Operandi
Topics: • Sociotechnical system issues of technological enablers
 
• Human Factors of joint human-machine cognition
• Human and/or machine cognitive vulnerabilities and potential defenses
• Human cognitive processes best poised for augmentation in Multi-Domain/CogWar context
• Trust, transparency, directability/controllability, reliance/compliance, and workload for intelligent CogWar aids
• Human Systems Integration (HSI) of assistance and automation systems, including adaptive human-machine interaction (HMI) and human-machine teaming systems
• Mature and prospective cognitive state and human performance assessment technologies, predictive algorithms, and cognitive augmentation approaches to defend against adversarial CogWar interventions
• Behavioural and social cyber assessment technologies and methods for individual, group, and population level CogWar enhancement and defence
• Technical issues of machine cognition, including sensors, sensor-data-fusion, and algorithms, especially regarding their influence on joint (human-machine) cognition
• Ubiquitous Sensing: Embedding of low (or lower cost) sensors to create large sensor networks across the human-physical-information domains (e.g., nano-sensors, biosensors, wearable sensing technologies)
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Created at 12/03/2024 14:00 by System Account
Last modified at 16/05/2024 11:00 by System Account
 
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