Institute for Creative Technologies

Download a one sheet PDF overview of this project.

ELECT BiLAT was designed with a specific training objective in mind: to provide students an immersive and compelling training environment to practice their skills in conducting meetings and negotiations in a specific cultural context. Students assume the role of a U.S. Army officer who needs to conduct a series of bi-lateral engagements or meetings with local leaders to achieve the mission objectives.

In one campaign the student is tasked with understanding why a U.S. built marketplace is not being used. The student must gather information on the social relationships among the characters in the scenario.

The student must also establish his or her own relationships with these characters and be sensitive to the character's cultural conventions. Any misstep could set the negotiations back or end them completely. The student must also apply sound negotiation strategies such as finding win-win solutions and properly preparing prior to the meeting.

The ELECT BiLAT social "simulation" was developed through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach and is part of the Enhanced Learning Environments with Creative Technologies (ELECT) suite of portable PC-based training programs designed to develop real-world skills.

Watch the LabTV video about Elect BILAT.

ELECT BiLAT was a part of the Learning with Adaptive Simulation and Training (LAST) Army Technology Objective (ATO). The project was a collaboration between the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI), U.S. Army Research Laboratory Human Research and Engineering Directorate (ARL-HRED) and U.S. Army Simulation and Training Technology Center (STTC).

USC's Game Innovation Lab was involved in the game design as well as creating a compelling set of scenarios with realistic characters that would be appropriate for the training objectives identified.

To represent and model the social and cultural elements, the ELECT BiLAT infrastructure includes research technologies including a dialogue manager, SmartBody animation technology -- from ICT's virtual human research project --, USC Information Science Institute's PsychSim social simulation system, as well as an intelligent coach and tutor to provide the student with run-time coaching and in-depth feedback during after action reviews.

Authoring tools were developed to support the content workflow. There has also been an effort to create a new scenario in the BiLAT framework within 12 weeks.

BiLAT AIDE is a complementary web-based course being created with the USC Rossier School of Education. The course will further enhance learning by providing instruction on the theories behind the practice of negotiation and cultural understanding.

ELECT BiLAT is in on-going trials with the U.S. Army. Preliminary results indicate that ELECT BiLAT meets its training goals.

Watch the original LabTV video at http://www.ndep.us/LabTV2.aspx?id=40&t=First-Person%20Thinker.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

• Met training needs not previously addressed
• Preparation prior to meeting
• Strategies for meeting and negotiating
• Building trust with partners
• Cultural awareness
• Innovative, multi-disciplinary development approach
• Leverage off-the-shelf game technology
• Increase capabilities with research technologies
• Create engaging and authorable learning experiences

Tags: cultural, immersive, meetings, negotiations, training

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