.Purdue students map out ‘Virtual Iraq’
Hypothetical: Department of Defense higher-ups want to infiltrate a certain area of Baghdad with hopes of breaking up a growing insurgent stronghold. But before they do, they’re wondering how the local neighborhood will react. Do they have sympathizers at a nearby bakery? Has the man living in the apartment upstairs been accused of making bombs?
Answers will soon be at their fingertips thanks to a Purdue University assistant professor and her students. They’re researching real day-to-day life details about Baghdad and its residents and inputting those facts into databases to create a kind of war game the military can use to foresee outcomes of possible actions and plan more strategically.
“If you plug in something like – this insurgency group takes over this bank – what are the options for coalition forces?” says Stacy Holden, an assistant professor of history.
The goal is to create the most realistic picture of Baghdad possible using uncompromised sources, she says. And just knowing that a particular city street is working-class Shiite isn’t enough.
“We want to be able to get into the head of the regular Iraqi person in Baghdad,” Holden says. “We don’t want to just stick with looking at what this or that political leader says.”
So how are the students finding such specific information about a city nearly 6,500 miles away?
Guided by a list of 700 research terms provided by the Department of Defense, a half-dozen students are scanning English-language Web sites. They’re looking for Iraqi memoirs and blogs and taking information from media reports and non-governmental organizations. Any little bit or detail that could be useful is added to the database.
Richard Oloffson, a graduate student from Naperville, Ill., working on the project, calls it “Virtual Iraq.”
He says if he’s looking at a neighborhood he wants to know, “the ethnic makeup, the religious makeup, is there raw sewage in the street, is there disease?”
Rashmi Chaturvedi works for Simulex Inc., which hired the Purdue students as subcontractors with the company’s Department of Defense dollars. Simulex, based near Purdue in West Lafayette, will take the information the students gather and create the program for the military by June.
Chaturvedi says the company creates synthetic worlds that mirror the real world. With this project, the company can anticipate what Baghdad will be like five years from now.
“You, as a policy-maker, can interject certain actions and look at the behavior and see how those actions affect the behavior,” Chaturvedi says.
Hopefully the program won’t just spit out military operations, Holden says.
“The purpose of this simulation is to create a range of choices for coalition forces,” she says. “Things like, we can do more public diplomacy. We can increase food subsidies.”
Holden says she wants her students’ work to help the military understand the nature of urban insurgency – and they want to know everything – down to who’s reading what newspapers and where they live.
“As I go through information about different quarters or neighborhoods, any time I find a description of any resident I mark it down,” she says. “We want to get down even further and say we know, for example, there are three veterans of the Iran-Iraq war who are receiving government pension and one of them lost a leg in that war. Or a lot of people work in mechanic shops there. Whenever we can find an individual who is in a specific place, we want to mark him down.”
And find out what’s important to Baghdad residents, Holden says. “Because maybe ideology isn’t important to him,” she says. “Maybe food supply is important to him. Maybe a new public school in this or that neighborhood is important to him.”
Danielle Benhamou, a student from Richboro, Pa., who is working on the project and was recently accepted to the Air Force’s pilot training program, says she hopes this will help the military make informed decisions.
“Hopefully this will make the policy-makers notice how intricately connected everything is,” she says. “See what would happen and see outcomes to prevent situations in the future.”
Journal Gazette
I can just see the the right complaining of the Liberal universities and the pointy headed academics
Answers will soon be at their fingertips thanks to a Purdue University assistant professor and her students. They’re researching real day-to-day life details about Baghdad and its residents and inputting those facts into databases to create a kind of war game the military can use to foresee outcomes of possible actions and plan more strategically.
“If you plug in something like – this insurgency group takes over this bank – what are the options for coalition forces?” says Stacy Holden, an assistant professor of history.
The goal is to create the most realistic picture of Baghdad possible using uncompromised sources, she says. And just knowing that a particular city street is working-class Shiite isn’t enough.
“We want to be able to get into the head of the regular Iraqi person in Baghdad,” Holden says. “We don’t want to just stick with looking at what this or that political leader says.”
So how are the students finding such specific information about a city nearly 6,500 miles away?
Guided by a list of 700 research terms provided by the Department of Defense, a half-dozen students are scanning English-language Web sites. They’re looking for Iraqi memoirs and blogs and taking information from media reports and non-governmental organizations. Any little bit or detail that could be useful is added to the database.
Richard Oloffson, a graduate student from Naperville, Ill., working on the project, calls it “Virtual Iraq.”
He says if he’s looking at a neighborhood he wants to know, “the ethnic makeup, the religious makeup, is there raw sewage in the street, is there disease?”
Rashmi Chaturvedi works for Simulex Inc., which hired the Purdue students as subcontractors with the company’s Department of Defense dollars. Simulex, based near Purdue in West Lafayette, will take the information the students gather and create the program for the military by June.
Chaturvedi says the company creates synthetic worlds that mirror the real world. With this project, the company can anticipate what Baghdad will be like five years from now.
“You, as a policy-maker, can interject certain actions and look at the behavior and see how those actions affect the behavior,” Chaturvedi says.
Hopefully the program won’t just spit out military operations, Holden says.
“The purpose of this simulation is to create a range of choices for coalition forces,” she says. “Things like, we can do more public diplomacy. We can increase food subsidies.”
Holden says she wants her students’ work to help the military understand the nature of urban insurgency – and they want to know everything – down to who’s reading what newspapers and where they live.
“As I go through information about different quarters or neighborhoods, any time I find a description of any resident I mark it down,” she says. “We want to get down even further and say we know, for example, there are three veterans of the Iran-Iraq war who are receiving government pension and one of them lost a leg in that war. Or a lot of people work in mechanic shops there. Whenever we can find an individual who is in a specific place, we want to mark him down.”
And find out what’s important to Baghdad residents, Holden says. “Because maybe ideology isn’t important to him,” she says. “Maybe food supply is important to him. Maybe a new public school in this or that neighborhood is important to him.”
Danielle Benhamou, a student from Richboro, Pa., who is working on the project and was recently accepted to the Air Force’s pilot training program, says she hopes this will help the military make informed decisions.
“Hopefully this will make the policy-makers notice how intricately connected everything is,” she says. “See what would happen and see outcomes to prevent situations in the future.”
Journal Gazette
I can just see the the right complaining of the Liberal universities and the pointy headed academics
posted by madtom at 5:51 PM
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