Colleagues, a little over a month ago, IPA hosted our first-ever APEX Conference at the Carahsoft Conference and Collaboration Center in Reston, Virginia. APEX is IPA’s forum to address the long-term education challenges in the rapidly evolving information and cognitive domains—challenges that are of interest to government, the private sector, and academia—and that ultimately impact strategic competition and national security. To address these challenges, APEX brought together educators, researchers, military professionals, war-gamers, students, AI and cyber experts, thought leaders, diplomats, and experienced practitioners.
Given APEX’s focus on education, we were pleased to see that over half of the participants consisted of academics and educators, and a variety of institutions were represented, including The University of Mississippi, The Citadel, Clemson, the University of Alabama, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois, and Norwich. We were also joined by interested professionals from organizations such as NATO and the United Nations.
What did we do?
Throughout the two-day conference, participants engaged with a collection of speakers and panels of experts on a wide variety of topics, including the future of Cognitive Warfare, Wargaming and the Synthetic Training Environment (STE), AI Influence on Decision-Making, and Collective Education. These panels gave APEX participants a space to engage and ask questions about research, best practices, and emerging trends from professionals across a wide range of backgrounds.
What did we achieve?
New Research
One highlight of APEX was the research competition. As IPA’s inaugural research competition, IPA received over 50 research papers on a wide variety of topics, including the effects of AI as a Cognitive Hazard, Cognitive Asset Protection, and Multilingual Cognitive Fidelity. Each of these papers will be published and available through an IPA publication platform for IPA members only. This will provide IPA members with a collection of new research and findings on topics of interest.
A Conversation on Cognitive Security Certification
Cognitive security has been a critical issue that has been discussed and emphasized throughout the official and informal channels of information professionals for years. However, we have seen a need for an organized and collaborative effort to train and develop this critical skill and topic for a wider audience. This is why IPA has sought to create a certification in cognitive security.
The cognitive security certification workshop at APEX reinforced IPA’s commitment to supporting professional standards and education for the emerging field of cognitive security. The workshop premiered results from the first-ever IPA Cognitive Security Benchmarking Survey, which highlighted themed insights and opportunities from more than 80 information-related community members in IPA on the topic of cognitive security objectives, challenges, opportunities, educational resources, certification, and more.
After an open discussion/Q&A about the survey results, APEX attendees were facilitated into small teams to brainstorm their own ideas for cognitive security competencies within a certification framework (considering task performance, levels of proficiency, validation methods). By the numbers, twelve teams presented a total of fourteen cognitive security competencies, followed by a lively group discussion that surfaced valuable questions, feedback, and perspectives that help inform the certification initiative.
An Emerging Community of Interest Focused on Education in the Cognitive Security Mission Space
One of the most impressive aspects of APEX was the diverse set of professions and disciplines represented to discuss cognitive security education as a growing national security priority. In the preparation for APEX, a small working group was formed encompassing professionals from extensive backgrounds in military IO, civilian defense contracting, psychology, and data science to help identify a way ahead to define and certify cognitive security. After APEX, this group has continued to push forward and focused on involving and expanding the working group into a full Community of Interest to give a space to a shared framework for cognitive security education.
What’s Next and What are the Challenges
APEX’s vision was to bring together a wider audience and create a collaborative space for educators, researchers, and national security professionals to focus on the cognitive challenge together. While this vision is complete, there is still a large challenge that remains: How can we move from just awareness to ownership by combining the fragmented expertise of other professionals into an organized, sustained answer to the cognitive security questions?
APEX aimed to play a small role in answering this fundamental question, but there remains more work on the cognitive front that must be done. IPA’s goal is to pursue the answer to this question by providing a space where collaboration and innovation can take place.