summer sprinting

If it is summer (and it certainly feels like it), then it must be time for the TNL Summer Sprints. This year, given the move to grand challenges, we’ve got six (plus one) efforts underway touching each of the three main areas. Look for updates as the teams make progress. Lots of interesting work, some of it pre-dating the summer (e.g. EI/EX and metaverse), and most of it we anticipate will lead to ongoing efforts.

Here are a few more details:

EI/EX – Ben Bourdreaux has been leading this effort since beginning of this year, and the team has a proposal into PIT-UN for follow-on funding. This summer they will look to flesh out the framework and approach.

metaverse – this effort started as a workshop with a goal of a mini-world-build looking at what the metaverse(s) will look like, and given that, what kind of regulation likely will be necessary. There is a broader team of RAND researchers who have been involved, and there are some blog posts highlighting preliminary thoughts.

biotech mapping – inspired in-part by conversations with LLNL researchers, Tim Marler, who is active within the biotech community of interest within RAND, and team will try to understand “who’s who in the zoo.” The goal is to understand what parts of government regulate what parts of the biotech industry, and map the landscape, particularly interested in gaps relating to emerging tech.

water blind spots – Sonaar Luthra is a TNL non-resident fellow and an expert in all-things water. This sprint will assess the data sets used to inform water policy, with a special emphasis on blind spots where regulations are informed by little or no data (and what can be done about it).

Narrative Red Teaming – it turns out that Khrystyna Holynska had been doing work relating to Russian disinformation and is interested in the concept of “pre-bunking”. Narrative Red Teaming is a nascent process that can facilitate pre-bunking, so the team will flesh out NRT with a couple of different case study areas.

Mutually Assured Deception – still in the early stages of this work, but the initial effort will take the approaches and frameworks used in Mutually Assured Destruction for nuclear threats, and “port” that to disinformation. This should provide an interesting starting point to develop frameworks to better understand how to avoid and/or remediate disinformation more broadly.

plus one – Housing Game – Jon Welburn, along with Jonathan Lamb and Kelsey O’Hollaren, are looking at economic equity issues with a focus on housing as the proxy. The goal is to prototype a game that explores the trade space around housing.