Psi Chi Colloquium: ‘Beyond Machines: Humans in Cyber Operations, Espionage, and Conflict,’ with University of Maryland’s Joseph Danks, March 15
March 9, 2017
Contact: Public Affairs
Phone: 410.837.5739
Joseph Danks, research professor and technical director for strategic intelligence analysis at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, will lead a colloquium, "Beyond Machines: Humans in Cyber Operations, Espionage, and Conflict," presented by the University of Baltimore's chapter of Psi Chi on Wednesday, March 15, beginning at 4:30 p.m. in Room 202 of the John and Frances Angelos Law Center (home of the UB School of Law), 1401 N. Charles St. The event is free and open to the public.
Kinetic warfare involves tanks, bullets, and other hardware, but it is widely accepted that an understanding of war must include the people who fight, from general staff to boots on the ground. In contrast, most discussions of cyberwarfare—its strategy, impacts, ethics and so on—focus on the machines, systems, and data, while largely ignoring the human element. Human agents are included only as collateral effects (e.g., the impact on humans of shutting down an adversary’s electrical grid), or as a locus of moral responsibility (e.g., providing the ground for the moral justification of a cyber-attack).
Prof. Danks will explore a range of conceptual and ethical issues that arise from the consideration of the cognitive constraints, biases, and heuristics of human agents in four different roles: the developers of a cyber-action (whether to attack or exploit); the target of that action; the defender against such an action; and third-party observers, such as neutral nations, or even the public within a nation engaged in cyber-actions.
Cyberwarfare is conducted with machines, often autonomous, but humans are the developers, targets, and defenders of cyber-actions, Prof. Danks has said. Thus, a full understanding of the conceptual distinctions and ethical dimensions of cyberwarfare must incorporate the human actors with all of their cognitive, conceptual, and cultural biases, tendencies, and foibles.
Prof. Danks has conducted research with a focus on how people comprehend sentences and text, especially across languages, the cognitive processes involved in translation, and other topics related to communication and language comprehension. At the Center for Advanced Study of Language, he has investigated ways to forecast the plans and intentions of a country’s leadership and populace, and also how to conduct remote psychological assessment of cyber adversaries.
Prof. Danks received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught for many years at Kent State University, serving as chair of psychology and dean of arts and sciences. He also has taught at Princeton and Stanford universities, the University of Warsaw, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Prof. Danks has authored and edited several books, and published extensively in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.
The University of Baltimore's chapter of Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology, is part of the Division of Applied Behavioral Sciences in UB's Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the College of Public Affairs, the Merrick School of Business, the UB School of Law and the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.