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Tangible Intuition: Bridging the Cultural Gap Through Technology September 2007
When President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq last year, the Iraqi prime minister put his hand over his heart after the two men shook hands. A Fox network television commentator observing the meeting remarked on air that the Iraqi's body language revealed his shock and surprise at the U.S. leader's visit. "The reporter didn't understand that the gesture made towards President Bush was a sign of respect," explains Dan Loehr, a computational linguist in MITRE's Command and Control Center. "Recognizing nonverbal behavior is critical to comprehending others, but people are often unaware of the extent to which meaning can vary across cultures, and that rules governing nonverbal behavior are often not explicit." Loehr and his co-principal investigator, LeeEllen Friedland, a social scientist in MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems, are leading a team of social scientists, language specialists, and engineers at MITRE on a project that will provide enabling technologies for sharing and analyzing nonverbal behavior data, as well as establish requirements for culturally valid nonverbal data and interpretation. Their ultimate goal is to improve the ways in which nonverbal behavior might be used in practical situations to help government sponsors do their work. Taking Intuition out of the Loop "To date, much of the successful use of nonverbal data by our sponsors in practical work settings has been based largely on 'intuition,'" says Friedland. "For example, the purported 9/11 '20th hijacker' was denied entry to the U.S. at Orlando International Airport because an immigration inspector thought there was something 'chilling' about the man. The inspector relied on his intuition, and we hope to articulate and formalize an understanding of the kinds of nonverbal cues he picked up on." This research project is occurring within the social and behavioral sciences category of the MITRE Technology Program. The program serves as the corporate vehicle for developing and researching new ideas, approaches and technologies, and applying them to solve the needs of MITRE's sponsors. "Providing technologies and methods for sharing and analyzing nonverbal behavior, especially as it pertains to government needs, will be useful in many ways," Friedland notes. "There is a lot of insight that can be gleaned from scientific research that is currently difficult to leverage outside the laboratory, as well as the experience of what we might call 'intuition practitioners' who use nonverbal behavior to make judgments, but they can't quite explain how. These new tools might eventually be applied in a variety of scenarios, such as at airport security points or border crossings." Getting Past the Point "A variety of nonverbal gestures can help—or hurt—understanding among people of different cultures," says Loehr. "Pointing is rude in some cultures, for example, and the thumbs-up sign can be considered obscene." The MITRE team is building a repository of nonverbal data, starting with an initial case study of Iraqi-Arabic/English interpreters who have worked with U.S. personnel in theater. The data collected will include gaze, posture, interpersonal distance, and gestures. The gestures will include easily recognizable motions, called "emblems," such as the "OK" hand sign used in North America. An Iraqi emblem for "no," for example, involves tilting the head quickly backward with a simultaneous tongue click. At the same time, the team is exploring and developing technology infrastructure for annotating and sharing data. This includes digital video annotation software that offers frame-accurate, multi-layered user-defined mark-up for verbal and nonverbal behavior. Connecting the Community Another major goal of this two-year research project, the first of its kind at MITRE, is to promote intra-community data exchange by tackling the issue of a common interoperability standard, since approximately a dozen incompatible video annotation tools exist already. Loehr emphasizes, "We don't want to reinvent the interchange format. We're trying to promote a common standard so data can be shared and used in a variety of tool environments." The MITRE team has already proposed an interoperability standard for the video annotation tools used in the research community. This past June, at the Third International Gesture Studies Conference at Northwestern University in Illinois, seven tool developers demonstrated how they have adapted their software to the MITRE-proposed standard. "Currently, there is no easy way to bridge between research groups or between the laboratory and our sponsors' real-world needs," Friedland says. "We also plan to leverage MITRE's information-sharing success in the field of neuroimaging," Loehr adds. MITRE's neuroinformatics portal already assists the brain-mapping community in sharing brain scan images and metadata (descriptive, embedded tags that enhance searchability and measurement of information). "We envision a similar infrastructure for metadata and nonverbal video data," he says. The pair believes their research could also have many sponsor applications. For instance, MITRE video-gaming experts have collaborated with commercial vendors to create immersive simulated training environments for Iraq-bound government personnel. The training media already makes use of culturally specific gestures, and the hope is that further nonverbal findings can be incorporated into the virtual training environments. "We have developed prototype characters that enact some of the typical gestures in the Iraqi-Arabic culture," says Loehr. Friedland points out that understanding foreign cultures is a critical need for government sponsors. "Nonverbal behavior is one aspect of that," she concludes. "MITRE has combined expertise in technology, social sciences, and sponsor missions, so we're uniquely positioned to help move this field forward and equip our sponsors with important, underutilized data on human communication." —by Cheryl Scaparrotta Related Information Articles and News
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| Page last updated: September 27, 2007 | Top of page |
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