Possibilities of Building Real Security with Virtual Worlds

Do you believe in security? What does it mean to you? How secure do you feel at home, in the workplace, whilst driving, on your holidays?

I was reading a new interesting media release from the University of Maryland titled “Building Real Security with Virtual Worlds” which brought more questions than answers to the topic.

It is good to know that “advances in computerized modeling and prediction of group behavior, together with improvements in video game graphics, are making possible virtual worlds in which defense analysts can explore and predict results of many different possible military and policy actions”.

They have some important technology components as stated in their paper such as stochastic opponent modeling agents, artificial intelligence software that uses data about past behavior of groups in order to create rules about the probability of that group various actions in different situations, “cultural islands,” which provide a virtual world representation of a real-world environment or terrain, populated with characters from that part of the world who behave in accordance with a behavioral model; and forecasting “engines” CONVEX and CAPE, which focus on predicting behavioral changes in groups based on validated on historical data.

What are your views on building computer-generated models that can automatically adapt to changes in group behaviors and to conditions on the ground? What could be the implications and risks? And what possibilities do you see in your business, your country, overall in your lives?

Dr. Mehmet Yildiz