Agent Driven Visualizations for Increasing Collaboration Effectiveness (ADVICE)

As the Air Force organizational structure grows more distributed, geographically separated team members will need a collaborative working space where they can generate shared understanding and synchronize collective C2 and ISR activities. Currently, there is no way to collaboratively visualize coordinated information from operations and intelligence sources across operational and planning functions. To address this need, Aptima will develop ADVICE (Agent-Driven Visualizations for Increased Collaboration Effectiveness)—an intelligent agent-driven visualization to support effective collaboration. This tool will allow users to view information across other C2ISR functions and enable them to more effectively and efficiently produce their own products. We will use knowledge of the multiple work domains and their connections to (1) design function-specific visualizations that increase collaboration efficiency and (2) design intelligent agents that monitor information and team interdependencies to facilitate the collaboration. These agents will automatically distribute desired information to individual team members through the shared decision-centric visualization to ensure that the team receives and collaborates over critical interdependent information. These collaborative, role-specific visualizations paired with agent- and human-driven information sharing will provide users with a tool that supports the entire strategy, planning, operations and assessment cycle across all domains and allows for efficient real-time replanning during execution. BENEFIT: ADVICE will provide distributed AOC warfighters with a capability to collaborate and share information through visualizations specific to their individual functions. The design of ADVICE will be guided by requirements from the operational community and basic principles of cognition and perception as well as information theory. Grounded in solid information, perceptual, and cognitive theory, ADVICE will not only address a critical need of the AOC, we anticipate that it will also have commercial viability in the Intelligence Collection and Analysis Domain (across DoD agencies), the Department of Homeland Security, as well as broader application within Operations Centers (e.g., Air and Space, Maritime, Tactical, etc.).