Transforming Producer/Consumer Relations through Modeling and Computation

Efforts to reform intelligence analysis have been motivated by the assumption that accurate analysis naturally leads to effective policy decisions. From this perspective, computational resources have primarily been devoted to the collection and assessment of empirical data in an effort to provide consumers with increasingly accurate predictions. By challenging the assumption that consumers welcome the predictions offered by intelligence analysts, a new perspective emerges regarding the ways in which the intelligence community may employ computational resources to develop increasingly useful and trusted analytic products and tradecraft. A new, model-centric analytic tradecraft that combines the computational resources of Big Data analysis, Agent-Based Models of artificial societies, and increasingly sophisticated and personalized human computer interaction technologies offer new opportunities to transform the relationship between intelligence producers and consumers.