Our Mission
CAIDAC strives to be a place of innovation: a hub for individuals with different skill sets and backgrounds to address consequential problems they could not attempt alone. We value humility, unusual perspectives, and a desire to change the world (for the better).
Our Story
Social media platforms have transformed conflict, political violence, and war. But the methods and tools researchers have available to them to study conflict have not undergone a similar revolution. We created CAIDAC to pioneer the AI tools necessary to analyze the weaponizing of social media.
The idea of CAIDAC and its mission was born from our experience living in communities affected by violence and civil war. We watched as social media transformed how armed groups recruited, fundraise, and terrorized global audiences in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.
In Syria, for example, there are more hours of video uploaded to social media platforms than there have been hours in the conflict. Cumulatively, social media posts create an expansive and almost real-time record of online and real-world events.
CAIDAC was co-founded by Laura Courchesne, Denilson Barbosa, Brian McQuinn, Cody Buntain, and Matthew Taylor.
CAIDAC embraces convergence research: solving "wicked" or complex problems by "integrating knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines and forming novel frameworks to catalyze scientific discovery and innovation."
At the center of CAIDAC's novel approach are human-in-the-loop AI systems built around an unprecedented collaboration between AI scientists, armed conflict researchers, disinformation scientists, public health specialists, and scholars of indigenous and First Nation communities.
