The Joint Threat Anticipation Center

The Joint Threat Anticipation Center was a collaborative project of the Center for International Studies and the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation at Argonne National Laboratory. It was funded by the Advanced Systems Concepts Office (ASCO) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2004-08, as part of the agency's larger Threat Anticipation Program.

The foundational objectives of the center were as follows:

Expand and champion the art and science of anticipating threats.
Establish a center located at the University of Chicago that will become a recognized ?center for excellence? of threat anticipation expertise, promotion, and products.
Develop a repository at Argonne National Laboratory for models, publications, and institutional memory of threat anticipation.
Provide the services that can assist ASCO with focused TAP activities and contacts that facilitate federal interagency participation.

As with any extended collaborative research project, these objectives evolved as the relationship between the two partners and funding agency grew and developed over four years. As concerns CIS, the Director and Associate Director identified and developed the relevant social science research and research product of the University of Chicago community, and built links between those researchers, Argonne, and DTRA to help advance the field in computational social science modeling and the anticipation of national security threats.