Thursday, November 17, 2011

Raytheon BBN lands $10.5M game development deal

By Michelle Lang

Raytheon BBN Technologies’ Sirius program, which focuses on game development to create better training systems, has won a $10.5 million multi-year Air Force Laboratory contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

The contract will aid the Cambridge company in creating an international detective-themed game that will teach users bias-mitigation strategies, Raytheon BBN said in a statement. The Sirius program brings together game designers, cognitive psychologists, intelligence analysis experts and game-player engagement experts.

The six bias types identified as potentially inhibiting proper decision making – and those that Raytheon BBN intends to focus on – include confirmation bias (seeking information to confirm preconceptions); blind spot bias (not knowing one’s own cognitive biases compared to others’); fundamental attribution error (placing too much emphasis on personality-linked impacts on behavior); anchoring bias (placing too much emphasis on one piece of information); representative bias (placing emphasis on a hypothesis by its resemblance to data available); and projection bias (presuming one’s own sentiments are shared by others).

Raytheon BBN is a Cambridge-based subsidiary of Waltham-based Raytheon Co., which completed its $350 million purchase of BBN in October 2009. The subsidiary last December said that DARPA was funding a program to create super high-capacity broadband encrypted communications technology and super high-resolution long-distance imaging.