Although the art of estimating human populations is mature, institutional estimation relies on researchers' intuitions or ill-fitting adaptations of consumer research. this project is to develop a data gathering and analysis methodology for measuring features of a population of institutions (e.g.,… More

Dsc proposes to conduct research related to the development of design guidelines for the optimumu allocation of cognitive tasks to the human and machine in computer-based army systems. out thesis is that mere capability of a machines: instead, the cognitive tasks allocated to the machine component… More

This research addresses a major defect permeating the theory and practice of decision science. the modeling of uncertainity, choice and value for prescriptive purposes is typically singular, i.e., a single approach is used. indeed, decision theory has been largely silent on what to do when multiple… More

Among the major causes of resistance to the use of decision aids of the near-universal mismatch between a user's thought processing and the analytic model and constructs imposed on him by the computer. to correct this situation, design principles must be develop ed based on experimental… More

A variety of alternative approaches have been proposed for inference in expert systems: bayesian probabilities, belief functions, fuzzy sets, and others. they differ in the concepts they seek to address in their normative justification, in ease of use, and psychological aptness for the purposes of… More

The success of future army personnel programs rests on over one million individual decisions to enter or remain in the force which are made each year by current and potential army personnel. current approaches to understanding and predicting these individual decisions are limited by their failure to… More

Although much research has been done on delineating what sorts of cognitive processes and biases operate in making certainty judgments within various decision making contexts,the idea of treating the task of decision making as an independent variable in and of itself and exploring what demands it… More

The successful introduction of ai technology into air force avionics has been hindered by the need for real-time reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent data, integration of high level subsystems with systems for signal analysis, and an adaptive human-computer interface. dsc proposes to test the… More

The successful introduction of ai technology into shipboard decision making has been hindered by the need for real-time reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent data, resolution of conflicts between conflicting objectives, integration of high level subsystems with systems for signal analysis, and… More

The successful introduction of ai technology into air force avionics has been hindered by the need for human-computer interfaces which represent information in ways that are compatible with the pilot's preferred means of representing information and making decisions. dsc's hypothesis is that recent… More

When a businessman or other decision maker needs an estimate (say, of sales of a new industrial product), and hehas access to rich and varied information, but limited resources he normally makes heavy use of judgement in his enquiry. personalist (bayesian) statistics provides a logical framework to… More

Many diverse methods of knowledge representation have been used by ai researchers. none appear powerful enough to capture the diverse types of knowledge that people possess nor do they appear flexible enough to support the acquisition of knowledge. the proposed project will develop a knowledge… More

Greater understanding is needed to cognitive processes which are most affected by uncertainty and time stress. we propose to develop a framework of cognitive structures and processes related to decision making under uncertainty and time stress, select an appropriate army testbed, and conduct a… More

Dcs proposes to develop a computer-based decision aid to support resource allocation decision making in the research, development, test, and evaluation environment. this decision aid will incorporate the best methods for categorizing, prioritizing, and allocating resources to the most promising… More

The objective of this proposed research is to develop new methods of testing and evaluation that are appropriate for c3i systems that employ artificial intelligence (ai). the approach will be to develop a multiattribute utility (mau) analysis of performance that fully and meaningfully characterizes… More

The modern battfield calls for high-stakes decisions and judgments in an increasingly complex environment characterized by high volumes of uncertain, incomplete, and often inconsistent information. in the future, intelligent computerized systems capable of adaptive learning will become necessary as… More

Military interest in artificial intelligence (ai) and expert systems is growing in response to needs for reducting manpower-intensive tasks and providing aid to decision makers whose informationprocessing capabililties are being overtaxed. the cutting edge of research on expert systems concerns… More

Decision science consortium, inc. (dsc) proposes to engage in an innovative research program to design and implement an adversarial planning system that is able to reason about the persistence over time of an adversary's belief and intentions. specifically, this system will utilize either a… More

The army has long recognized that a critical part of its leader development process is instilling in executives the required decision-making and thinking skills. the different major military educational institutions have instituted executive training programs, each of which has developed its own… More

Overall performance of army units is the product of a complex interaction of a myriad of unit characteristics and environmental factors. while army subject-matter expers (especially commanders) are able to maje judgments about the relative quality of units, no metric now exists which can be applied… More

Computer-based tutorial systems have now become effective trainers in a number of domains. many good systems are modeled after theories of human learning and knowledge representation. however, such systemstypically assume a limited view of human knowledge, hence limiting their applicability to… More

Personalized decision analysis (pda), based on the maximization of subjective expected utility, is academically well established as a normative model of decision making. practitioners working on real decisions have recently developed variants that have proven to be useful prescriptive tools for… More

When a businessman or other decision maker needs an estimate(say, of sales of a new industrial product) and he has ac- cess to rich and variedinformation but limited resources he normally makes heavy use of judgement in his enquiry. personalist(bayesian) statistics provides a logical frame- work to… More

The successful introduction of advanced avionics technology into commercial cockpits is hindered by the lack of understanding of how best to interface such capabilities with the knowlege representations and processing strategies utilized by pilots. traditional human factors concerns must be… More

Advances in automated image understanding and decision aids have created a vast new potential for support of strategic and tactical operations. the non-monotonic probabilist (nmp), developed by members of the proposed project team, is a unique generic inference framework which is domain independent… More

This research program will develop and extend the mathematical theory underlying the elicitation of probability distributions for use in bayesian regression analyses. incorporating expert opinion in the form of probability distributions is essential in applications for which available data are… More

DSA proposes to develop a cost benefit analysis tool for command, control, communications, and computer (C4) systems. This tool will incorporate the best combination of methods from the fields of economic analysis, decision analysis, and optimization into a comprehensive functional/economic… More

This research is aimed at producing a dependable system design prototype. It will serve as a testbed for research on the integration of dependability automation suport into the systems design process by assisting designers in quantifying tradeoffs between dependability and other system attributes.… More

Decision Science Associates, Inc. (DSA) proposed to develop and demonstrate an automated decision support tool for long-range acquisition planning. This tool will support the assessment and prioritization of system concept alternatives and supporting technologies based on military operational… More

Adolescents make health, lifestyle and other decisions which can affect them and others over their entire lives. Research has found them often to be seriously misguided. A method exists to counter decision making deficiencies-personalized decision analysis (PDA)-but its acceptance outside a circle… More

Decision Science Associates, Inc. (DSA) proposes to design and prototype an automated decision aid for the assessment of pre-flight risk by Army rotorcraft pilots. This aid will support the rapid assessment of risk based on readily available information. Phase I consists of 4 tasks. In Task 1 we… More

This proposal presents a system dynamics model of the weapons development and acquisition process. The system dynamics modeling methodology differs from conventional modeling techniques in that is easily incorporates the non-linear feedback linkages and decision-making functions that are so… More

This research is aimed at producing a software quality decision support system to assist managers in making programmatic and technical decisions concerning software projects. Phase I is proposed in three tasks. In Task 1, we will identify important factors in a decision support system. This will… More

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Decision Science Associates (DSA) has the goal of developing a decision support tool that combines methods from software measurement, Bayesian statistics, and multiattribute utility theory (MAU). This tool will support a software manager's… More