{"id":37351,"date":"2021-10-07T16:30:45","date_gmt":"2021-10-07T20:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/materials\/?post_type=news&p=37351"},"modified":"2021-10-11T09:22:09","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T13:22:09","slug":"37351","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/materials\/news\/37351\/","title":{"rendered":"Bytes not bombs"},"content":{"rendered":"

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation Innovation Hub<\/a>\u00a0has enlisted a team of Johns Hopkins engineering students in the fight against misinformation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Whiting School team members\u2014all students in Johns Hopkins University’s\u00a0<\/span>Clark Scholars Program<\/a>\u2014are tasked with defining what has come to be known as cognitive warfare as well as designing a system to identify, measure, and track attacks that confuse, misinform, and manipulate the behavior of targeted audiences.<\/p>\n

“Today’s battles are being fought with ideas,” said team member William Rong, a third-year\u00a0<\/span>materials science and engineering<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>student. “I think we all want an informed and less polarized society, so this project is really important.”<\/p>\n

“TODAY’S BATTLES ARE BEING FOUGHT WITH IDEAS. I THINK WE ALL WANT AN INFORMED AND LESS POLARIZED SOCIETY, SO THIS PROJECT IS REALLY IMPORTANT.”<\/strong><\/div>\n
William Rong\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Materials Science and Engineering student<\/span><\/div>\n

Clark Scholars work on innovative projects to gain practical engineering experience and are challenged to develop solutions to real-world needs. Established in 2016 with a $15 million investment in the Whiting School of Engineering from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, the program is designed not only to attract talented engineering students to Johns Hopkins, but also to prepare them for leadership roles. The team members are working with NATO through the Whiting School of Engineering’s\u00a0<\/span>Center for Leadership Education<\/a>, with advisers Alexander Cocron, a CLE lecturer, and Lawrence Aronhime, associate teaching professor and director of CLE’s international programs.<\/p>\n

Since last year, Rong and his team have been working remotely with peers from Imperial College London and graduate students from the Czech Technical University in Prague on the project. Their first goal was to delineate cognitive warfare’s parameters and describe what it involves. In the end, the group defined it as a combined arms approach that integrates the capabilities of several existing warfare techniques, including cyber, information, psychology, and social engineering, to achieve a desired outcome without any physical fighting.<\/p>\n

“The term ‘cognitive warfare’ barely appeared on the internet when we began our study,” Cocron says. “The students were the first to sit down and really think about how to define it and what it looks like.” Cocron added that\u00a0<\/span>an article that the student team wrote for\u00a0<\/span>NATO Review<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>on the subject has been “quite influential.”<\/p>\n

Next, the students began to tackle the challenge of creating a system, or tool, to identify and track cognitive warfare campaigns. According to Cocron, such a system would need to recognize patterns (also called “signatures”) in the actions of those waging cognitive warfare, and then have the ability to trace the origins of that disruptive online content. With these two tasks in mind, the group is designing a live map inspired by the very successful COVID-19 dashboard, created by a team at the Whiting School of Engineering’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering and used by scientists, government, and public health officials around the world to track the novel coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n

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