And that doesn’t refer just to who that person is officially, but whether or not they should be trusted.
Shuyuan Mary Ho, an assistant professor in the School of Information in the College of Communication and Information at Florida State University, specializes in cybersecurity and created a software application capable of analyzing and relaying the disposition of a human individual and thus aids in the identification of potentially dangerous behaviors. Ho and researchers from Cornell University previously reproduced an environment in online games to present threats like fraud and deceit.
“This type of behavior is very predictable based on the language cues that we’re able to identify,” Ho said.“Organizations are becoming more virtual and employees are being pulled in from all over the world to collaborate on a project… In situations like this, all we can do is try to understand their communication patterns to understand their information behavior.”
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently rewarded Ho and her lab a six-month $50,000 Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant to continue to test the reliability and marketability of the software product. This grant is given to previously funded NSF research to “foster entrepreneurship that will lead to the commercialization of technology that has been supported previously by NSF-funded research.”
Ho states that the new software is essentially a “trustworthiness inference,” that works by, “analyzing online communications.” As such, the list for areas of possible application is lengthy and could be used by government organizations, corporations, online dating sites, for meeting purposes as well as benefitting employment processing. Some relationships, business or personal, exist over long distances, and sometimes online communication is the only available method of contact.
“Sometimes you know them, sometimes you don’t,” Ho said. “If you’ve never met who you’re communicating with, then all the evidence you have is basically just the online communication.”
Ho’s new software application assesses human communication using online conversations and behaviors that can tell whether the intention of the individual is malevolent or benevolent.
“This software application can be thought of as a form of artificial intelligence for detecting changes in users’ motivation and trustworthiness,” Ho said. “Using a variety of mechanisms, this system creates a statistical user profile and learns about users’ information behavior patterns based on language and dialogue with other users in social media communication.”
According to Ho, this software is important because background checks simply highlight past activities and events. These are static, while humans are inherently dynamic, and their level of trust can change. “It is a good idea to learn about the person and how stable they are even before you have facial cues,” Ho said. This would be very useful for a large company or organization with trade secrets, like the military, or Apple.
-Bryan Díaz, Writer
Online communication is steadily replacing face-to-face communication and will continue to do so as technological innovation keeps changing the way personal and business transactions are done. However, this type of interaction lacks any information provided by body cues and complete micro-expressions, and as such, you may not really know the person who you’re talking to. |
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