Learning in the Hot Seat: An Intelligent Mentor for JFACCs-to-be

The purpose of the Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC) Expedient Mentoring Interface (JEMENI) research is to address a need in the preparation of JFACCs and their Air Operations Center (AOC) staff. We will expand the results of our Phase I Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) findings into a working prototype of an intelligent mentoring system. We will elicit expertise from JFACCs and utilize doctrinal and educational sources to describe the cognitive challenges and decision-making strategies that are common in air-space campaign planning and execution. Using a Decision-Centered Design (DCD) approach to inform the design process, we will establish a Synthetic Task Environment (STE) to collect user feedback to identify improvements. A set of “intelligent” interfaces and filters will be developed to access resources, information, and tools that support JFACC performance. We will formalize the design in sufficient detail to demonstrate a working JEMENI prototype, with selected functionality, which we intend to evaluate in a large-scale joint training exercise. This demonstration will allow us to evaluate acceptability, usability, and effects of the mentoring system on key cognitive tasks that are performed in the AOC.