Professor R. Michael Young, deputy director of EAE and professor of computer science at the University of Utah, has been awarded $124,856 by Charles River Associates as part of a larger grant from the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) to support his research proposal entitled “PSyCHIC: Predictive System for Cyber Hostility using Integrated Computational Models”

The award runs from March, 2018 to March, 2019. In this work, Young and his team will be developing a model of story structure leveraged from AI planning models, specifically drawing on the team’s previous work creating the DPOCL planning knowledge representation. They will use the new model to characterize cyber-related activity data and build specific techniques that produce effective discourse about the stories they model (for instance, by generating summaries, highlights, re-tellings, etc). They will build a cyber-domain-specific representation consistent with the model, and will produce a system that can automatically create textual narrative descriptions of cyber-activity data from its description.