Wicked problems. Novel approaches. Impactful responses.

The Global Security Initiative (GSI) produces mission-relevant approaches and decision support tools to address some of the world’s most vexing and complicated security challenges.

As Arizona State University’s hub for global security research, we leverage the world-class expertise of ASU faculty and GSI’s connections with the global defense, security, development and diplomacy communities to take new approaches toward the world’s wicked problems.

The results are tools, technologies and systems that are impactful, timely and useful to policymakers and implementers.

$34 million+

in research expenditures in FY 2020

More than 150

affiliated faculty representing over 12 college-level units

#3

in the nation for DARPA young faculty awards

Current research priorities

Human, artificial intelligence and robot teaming

Narrative, disinformation and strategic influence

Visualization and analytics

Recent news and events

A research agenda for Disinformation: How to make progress when computer science is not enough

Disinformation is a quintessential socio-technical challenge – it is driven fundamentally by people and amplified significantly by technology. As such, technological solutions alone will not be sufficient in addressing this key national security challenge – technical advancements in identifying and mitigating the spread of disinformation must be tightly coupled with social interventions in the areas of education, training, and ethics.

In this talk, Nadya Bliss discusses what an interdisciplinary research agenda for tackling the challenge of disinformation could look like, along with the benefits and challenges of truly interdisciplinary research. Bliss also provided examples of current research that bring experts from different disciplines together to develop systemic responses to the problem. Click link for Slide Deck.

Measuring Real-time Coordination Dynamics: Extensible Models and Metrics for Human-AI-Robot Teaming

Dr. Jamie Gorman, Associate Professor in Engineering Psychology at Georgia Tech University, will discuss his research on team performance in complex sociotechnical settings, presenting the view that development, validation, and transitioning of real-time team modeling languages and metrics are at the forefront of next-generation human-AI-robot systems.

Human, AI and robot teaming

Advancing Crowdsourced Wisdom: Rethinking What Information Is Gathered and How It Is Aggregated

Dr. Adolfo Escobedo, Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, will discuss his research on various methods to improve the outcomes of crowdsourcing, including integration of machine learning techniques.

Mission support

GSI focuses on long-term security needs rather than short-term funding opportunities. Financial support for GSI’s efforts to address these long-term security needs are provided by government, industry and private foundations.