DR. RAND WALTZMAN
The Godfather of Cognitive Security
Keynote
Adjunct Senior Information Scientist, RAND Corporation (Ret)
Founding Board Member, Information Professionals Association
Former DARPA Program Manager, Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC)
Author of the 2017 Senate testimony that named and defined the field: "The Weaponization of Information: The Need for Cognitive Security"
40 years of AI research applied to social media and the information environment
Thursday
9:30 AM
Keynote | The Decision Environment:
An Operational Theory of Cognitive Conflict
Modern influence operations are typically analyzed through communications, narratives, and information. This talk argues that these are not the operational object of cognitive conflict, but mechanisms through which a deeper object, the decision environment, is modified. The talk introduces a concept of the decision environment, explains how competing adversarial and defensive processes continually modify it, examines how artificial intelligence fundamentally changes the balance between those processes, and describes the implications for a discipline of Cognitive Security Operations. The resulting perspective provides not only a way of understanding cognitive conflict, but also a foundation for future research, operational methods, and decision-support technologies.
Rand Waltzman is widely credited with coining the term "cognitive security" in his April 2017 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, "The Weaponization of Information: The Need for Cognitive Security." That testimony named the psycho-social threats emerging from the information environment (social media manipulation, disinformation, and information operations by state and non-state actors) as a distinct security discipline in its own right, and called for a national center dedicated to studying it.
With 40 years of experience applying artificial intelligence to social media and the information environment, Waltzman has held senior roles across government, industry, and academia: Senior Information Scientist at the RAND Corporation, acting Chief Technology Officer at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, and Program Manager at DARPA, where he created and led the Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program. He is a founding board member of the Information Professionals Association, a nonprofit dedicated to bridging cognitive security research, operations, and policy.
He remains one of the field's most sought-after voices on disinformation and influence operations, frequently comparing the information threat to a chronic disease — not something to be cured once, but managed continuously.