Army scientists develop computational model to predict human behavior

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Army researchers have developed for the first time an analytic model to show how groups of people influence individual behavior.

Technically speaking, this had never been done before: No one had taken the computational information from a collective model (numerical solutions of, say, thousands of equations) and used it to exactly determine an individual's behavior (reduced to one equation). Scientists from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory report their findings ("Fractional Dynamics of Individuals in Complex Networks" in the October edition of Frontiers in Physics.

This discovery was the product of ongoing research to model how an individual adapts to group behavior. ARL's program in network science seeks to determine collective group behavior emerging from the dynamic behavior of individuals. In the past, the collaborative work of Drs. Bruce West a senior scientist at the Army Research Office, and Malgorzata Turalska, a post-doctoral researcher at ARL, focused on constructing and interpreting the output of large-scale computer models of complex dynamic networks from which collective properties--such as swarming, collective intelligence and decision making--could be determined.

https://www.army.mil/article/212747/army_scientists_develop_computational_model_to_predict_human_behavior?fbclid=IwAR2-4q_LoA93ltzt0BOjLf1XoT3-Nl5AgTY7wi5oCkWICe_DD9OiM3mEPbc