FTI Awarded OSD Phase I Contract for Rapid Ethnographic Assessment
9/18/08
Frontier Technology, Inc. (FTI) has been awarded a research contract entitled Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Tool, a decision support tool that will help troops working day-to-day operations in developing nations, as well as NATO. It will result in enhancing their ability to understand the cultural composition of third world and developing nation states.
This work will develop innovative algorithms to provide Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and Human Terrain Team analysts with additional insight into the potential cultural effects of different military missions. An ethnographic data collection plan will be developed and automated to synthesize data from multiple sources. The resulting Ethnographic Planning Tool will be capable of comparing task options to minimize potential risks and impacts to host-country cultural elements
In parallel, the FTI Team will commercialize this planning aide by applying the decision support infrastructure to integrate cultural-based risk assessments and specific task utility for use by international agencies and Federal-level organizations supporting disaster relief missions around the globe. | 
