Narrative Mind

Customers spoken to this week: 14Total customers spoken to: 14

Sponsor: Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER)

The Narrative Mind team contains experts in software engineering, social media design, and web-based information operations (IO). We seek to develop tools that will optimize discovery and investigation of communication trends on social media.

MVP

Problem: Extracting message meaning is difficult with current commercial tools.

MVP Solution: Crowdsourced Categorization

1. Consume data from source network (e.g. Twitter through GNIP)

2. Search/filter to identify target messages

3. Distribute raw messages to crowd network (Crowdflower)

4. Return sorted messages by relevant categories

5. Optimized interface for consuming/viewing data by topic category

Customer Discovery

Hypotheses ❏ Commercial software for social media analysis has limited military utility.❏ More automation for analyzing social media by content is desired.❏ Information overload of messages is a problem for end-users.❏ Tracking success of counternarratives is a pain point.

Experiments ❏ Interviewed customers to uncover key pain points.❏ Explored commercially available tools and current limitation of options.❏ Presented options for new scalable categorization tools for uncovering topic

meaning and categorization.

Results ❏ Content categorization is a critical component for strategic responses.❏ Monitoring viral potential of social media content is a major, underexplored

area.❏ Sentiment analysis of message data has limited utility.❏ Generating counternarratives is difficult without human element.

Actions Moving forward with expanded tweet categorization/storage MVP that prioritizes:

1. Workflow optimization for analysts with integrative UI.2. Expedite content categorization with crowdsourcing.3. Develop better predictive analytics for monitoring viral potential.

Mission Model Canvas

- Categorize social media posts by content for monitoring and tactical purposes.

- Understand viral potential social media posts in real-time.

- Gnip/Twitter

- CrowdFlower, Samasource, or Mechanical Turk

- Pre-existing social media service and micro-labor aggregators

ARCYBER wants to derive “meaning” from extremist social media presence.

Primary: Intelligence analysts receive a better platform.

- General public benefits from more effective social media monitoring.

- Optimize workflow for social media analysts

- Expedite categorization of social media content.

- Use MechanicalTurk to crowdsource categorization of content.

- Algorithmic virality predictor to bubble up important, time-sensitive threats.

- Build on design of now-defunct Palantir Torch to present content in a streamlined manner.

- Force multiplier for intelligence analysts: receive cleaner, pre-categorized data, target the most urgent priorities.- Increase throughput to quantify and flag viral content.- Improve the categorization of unstructured social media data points using crowdsourced micro-task labor.

- Architecture that can support massive concurrent data aggregation and analysis. E.g. Storm/Hadoop.

- Testing with analysts

- MechanicalTurk or crowdsourcing labor (microtasks)- UI Development/Testing with CYBERCOM/ARCYBER analysts.- Software Development

- Access to Twitter firehose (Stanford academic license)

- Language specific crowdsourcing staff.

- Individual Analysts- ARCYBER

- Continued partnership with crowdsourcing firms, CrowdFlower, Samasource, etc.

Beneficiaries

Mission AchievementMission Budget/Costs

Buy-In/Support

Deployment

Value Proposition

Key Activities

Key Resources

Key Partners

Value Proposition Canvas

Products& Services

Desktop tracking and analysis

platform.

Customer Jobs

Develop potential counter

narratives.No way to easily track real-time action of tweets/hashtags

Gains

Pains

Gain Creators

Pain Relievers

Platform for automatically categorizing tweets, escalating potentially viral.

- Better detection ability and improve response time to potentially viral narratives, shut down or respond before it gains momentum

- Semi-automation of tweet categorization and virality detection- Filing tools for user & hashtag histories