Eric Swedlund reports for the Arizona Daily Star on a taxpayer-funded research program at the University of Arizona. Excerpt:
To boost national security, the Defense Department is paying for a $4 million UA research project on detecting deceit in communication.
In the electronic communication age, the military faces more challenges because analysts cannot always rely on conventional models of lie detection.
“We know deception is commonplace everywhere,” from daily conversations to military endeavors, said Judee Burgoon, the principal investigator.
Burgoon said the project’s significance “has grown astronomically” since Sept. 11. “Obviously it’s extremely timely.”
“How might we have been able to possibly . . . provide earlier intelligence” about attacks? she asked.
“Information power is more important than firepower.”
Military intelligence officers and criminal investigators would like to have fully automated tools, Burgoon said. There was great hope for the polygraph and other devices, but none are fully reliable.
“The best hope is a highly trained human augmented by tools,” Burgoon said. “Humans are extraordinary information processors, especially when they’re well-trained.”
Burgoon, a communication professor and director of human communication research at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Management of Information, reports to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research on the five-year project.
Collaborating with Burgoon and her UA team are researchers at Florida State University, Michigan State University and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
One goal is to devise computer software or hardware tools that could detect potentially deceptive patterns or characteristics in electronic transmissions such as e-mail or cellular phone conversations.
Computer software could offer alerts at different levels of danger by searching for words or phrases that warrant further investigation. Such a program could offer only a probability of truthful discourse and couldn’t determine if a particular message or person is deceptive.