HERMIONE II

Collection capabilities for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) continuously improve, generating more data than can be handled by human analysts alone. Although personal digital assistants have emerged in the consumer domain to support the needs of everyday users, it is challenging to design such systems to help analysts manage overwhelming data in environments that are dynamic, noisy, and uncertain. It is critical that these support tools fit the natural workflow of these highly skilled cognitive workers, to maximize performance while avoiding disruptions. In response to this need, Aptima and its partners at Parallax Advanced Research propose to develop a tool for Higher Efficiencies through Recommendations from a Multimodal Intelligent agent for Operations in Networked Environments (HERMIONE), a digital assistant that supports analysts by proactively bringing critical information to their attention, identifying and supporting opportunities for more efficient collaborative workflow, and streamlining routine tasks. HERMIONE will improve efficiency and quality of analysis by creating recommendations based on context-aware reasoning and presenting them through human-centered multimodal interface techniques to maximize fit within analysts’ workflows. Ultimately, HERMIONE will help analysts better understand the complex information environment, increase collaboration among analysts, and improve the quality of the analyses they produce.