Technosocial predictive analytics for security informatics

Challenges to the security, health, and sustainable growth of our society keep escalating asymmetrically due to the growing pace of globalization and global change. The increasing velocity of information sharing, social networking, economic forces, and environmental change has resulted in a rapid increase in the number and frequency of “game-changing moments” that a community can face. Social movements that once took a decade to build now take a year; shifts in public opinion that once took a year to take root now take a couple of months. More and more frequently, these critical moments occur too suddenly for the affected communities to succeed in countering the consequent adversities or seizing the emerging opportunities. Now more than ever, we need anticipatory reasoning technologies to forecast and manage change in order to secure and improve our way of life and the environment we inhabit. The ability to estimate the occurrence of future events using expertise, observation and intuition is critical to the human decision-making process. From a biophysical perspective, there is strong evidence that the neocortex provides a basic framework for memory and prediction in which human intelligence emerges as a process of pattern storage, recognition and projection rooted in our experience of the world and driven by perception and creativity [1]. There is increasing consensus among cognitive psychologists that human decision making can be seen as a situation-action matching process which is context-bound and driven by experiential knowledge and intuition [2-4]. Despite the natural disposition of humans towards prediction, our ability to forecast, analyze and respond to plausible futures remains one of the greatest intelligence challenges. There are well known limitations on human reasoning due to cognitive and cultural biases. Kahneman’s and Tversky’s groundbreaking work