Structured Evidential Argumentation System™ (SEAS)
The survival of an enterprise often rests upon its ability to make correct and timely decisions, despite complexities and uncertainties. SRI’s Structured Evidential Argumentation System (SEAS) software tool uses best analytic practices to guide analysts in collaboratively reasoning from evidence about potential threats and opportunities.
Available for license, SEAS has been applied to a broad range of problems pertaining to national defense and commercial enterprises.
SEAS captures structured lines of reasoning, representing analytic best practices for given classes of problems, and then uses these to guide the collection and interpretation of evidence. Through a web interface, users access graphical depictions of these arguments to quickly understand
- Current conclusions
- What evidence is driving them
- What evidence remains to be found to guarantee a comprehensive assessment
- How other lines of reasoning on the same or related topics compare and contrast
When a user adds evidence to an argument, it is immediately updated, reflecting the impact of the new evidence on its conclusion, for all to see. This approach to collective reasoning has been applied to a wide range of problems and has been experimentally shown to speed the development and improve the quality of analytic assessments.
SEAS was initially developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Further investment by SRI resulted in a more flexible and capable tool, referred to as High SEAS.
Key Benefits
Overall:
- Promotion of the use of analytic best practices for collecting, organizing, and interpreting evidence, pertaining to complex questions of interest to an enterprise
- Collective reasoning and critical review, leveraging what each contributing analyst knows and does best
- Quicker development of quality analytic products
- Improved analytic rigor and learning
- Capture of the evolution of corporate thinking and facilitation of its reuse
- Visually summarizations of analytic reasoning that are accessible to decision-makers, ultimately leading to better decisions
National defense applications:
- Nation-state stability assessment
- Asymmetric threat assessment
- Assessment of terrorist motives
- Mission information preparation
- Counter-intelligence assessment
- Network system analysis
- Infrastructure vulnerability assessment
Commercial applications:
- Project management
- Executive dashboards
- Competitor intelligence-gathering
- Fraud detection
- Human resources grade assessment and applicant evaluations
- Technical intelligence
