Informatics, Risk, and the Post-Modern World

Course Composition and Objectives

• Developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the principles of security informatics and how they interact with risk, culture, politics, religion
• Create their own literature reviews of select topics that integrate theory, methods, and applications domains
• Realize the importance of risk in post-modern culture to enable assessment of situations, cases, and scenarios
• Think critically: develop the ability to identify experimental designs involving risk, culture, and informatics
• Develop measures of effectiveness and evaluation of risky behaviors and gather performance data from a variety of sources
• Develop analytical models for predicting threats and risk within post-modern culture
• Instructors Choice: Instructors may choose topics and learning objectives that meet the spirit of the course as defined here. Instructors may choose to devote more time to the learning objectives listed above or to add additional, complimentary objectives. Supplementary material and objectives should not overlap with the defined content of other courses in the curriculum

Course Description

The post-modern world provides a changing climate and context for defining and understanding threats, intelligence, decisions, and risk. Likewise, post-modern cultures consist of beliefs that are heavily influenced by psychology, social connectivity, collective behavior, religion, ethnicity, and political systems. This system of systems is heavily dependent upon and influenced by information, information technology, and the web (social informatics). When examining human behavior as it impacts risk, these various social-technical factors must be considered in planning for terrorism, intelligence analysis, and emergency events.

As the post-modern world becomes increasingly complicated, the ability to discern, identify, and address threats in terms of risk becomes exceedingly more difficult. Provision of learning underlying psychological, social, political, religious, and technical components of how risk accelerates through various stages will be critical for protection of national and international interests within the security sphere. Security informatics will be at the heart of both recognizing emerging situations and employing tools/agents/measures to assuage emergency, terrorist, or even national disaster events.

This course provides the student with a broad perspective to critically examine both theories and practice of security informatics as related to the cultures in which threats emerge asymmetrically. Students will be placed on the role of systems analysts to problem solve and analyze information from a broad bandwidth of information specifically as informed by culture, post-modern thought, psychological intent, and situation awareness. The course will be grounded by participation in case studies and/or analyzing exercises of risk. Students will be required to do comprehensive reading assignments, engage in team cognition-social interaction, and become familiar with social informatics concepts and tools as related to risk, terrorism, and information warfare.

As the post-modern world becomes increasingly complicated, the ability to discern, identify, and address threats in terms of risk becomes exceedingly more difficult. Provision of understanding some of the underlying psychological, social, political, religious, and technical components of how risk accelerates through various stages will be critical for protection of national and international interests within the security sphere. As extreme events become more prevalent in society, security informatics will be at the heart of both recognizing emerging situations and employing tools/agents to assuage emergency, terrorist, or even national disaster events.