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Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA)

The Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) partnered with researchers from the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) to hold a two-day workshop on Adversarial Decision Making.  Both CREATE and CCICADA are Centers of Excellence supported through the DHS Office of University Programs.

What is Adversarial Decision Making?

Adversarial decision making arises in situations that include counterterrorism, corporate competition, and federal regulation. Military leaders, corporate executives, and consumer groups regularly make large investments motivated by the presence of intelligent opposition. Such choices typically entail high-consequence outcomes conditioned on low-probability events. Current approaches for solutions are largely drawn from the fields of decision analysis and game theory, but they suffer shortcomings that limit their applicability. The approaches from decision analysis have largely overlooked adversarial situations, and while they are a key element of game theory, it typically makes unrealistic assumptions about how humans process information and cope with uncertainty.

Why CREATE and CCICADA?

The workshop blended CREATE’s expertise in risk analysis and economics with CCICADA’s expertise in mathematical modeling and handling uncertainty to address some of the gaps in current approaches. The workshop was an outgrowth of a broader CCICADA-CREATE partnership that includes a research project on “layered defense” building on CREATE’s work with adversarial games for airport surveillance. The new project extends the analysis to situations where an outer layer of surveillance/security can lead to changes/updates in an inner layer of security.

From Left: James Pita (USC graduate student), Fred Roberts (Director, CCICADA), Erroll Southers (Associate Director for Transition, CREATE) and Manish Jain (USC graduate student).

The workshop, hosted by CCICADA and held at Rutgers University on Sept. 30 – Oct. 1, was co-organized by CREATE researcher Milind Tambe and included talks by several CREATE researchers. One such talk was given by CREATE’s Associate Director for Research Transition, Erroll Southers, who is a former Presidential nominee for Assistant Secretary of the TSA and Deputy Director in the California Office of Homeland Security and FBI Special Agent. Southers delivered a talk entitled “The Emerging Threat: Ten Years Ago, Al-Qaeda Said This Is Where They Wanted To Be,” in which he gave many examples of terrorist or attempted terrorist attacks. His talk emphasized that Al-Qaeda often attempts multiple attacks at the same time and it will often return to an earlier venue to attack it a second time. Both of these patterns were reflected in the September 11, 2001, attacks, as well as in other cases that Southers described. Southers also compared approaches to counter-terrorism in Israel with those in the U.S. and stressed that the difference in Israel is that everyone is heavily engaged in surveillance by continued awareness of their surroundings.

For more information on this workshop, visit: http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/DecisionMaking/abstracts.html