Dee H. Andrews

Combating the Insider Cyber Threat

The penetration of US national security by foreign agents as well as American citizens is a historical and current reality thats a persistent and increasing phenomenon. Surveys, such as the e-crime watch survey, reveal that current or former employees and contractors are the second greatest cybersecurity threat, exceeded only by hackers, and that the number of security incidents has increased geometrically in recent years. The insider threat is manifested when human behavior departs from compliance with established policies, regardless of whether it results from malice or a disregard for security policies. In this article, we focus on the need for effective training to raise staff awareness about insider threats and the need for organizations to adopt a more effective approach to identifying potential risks and then taking proactive steps to mitigate them.

Training Robust Decision Making in Immersive Environments

We provide a review and analysis of much of the published literature on decision making that is relevant to the design of immersive environments. This review draws from the basic and applied literature in order to provide insight for the design of such synthetic environments. Included in this review are articles and books cited in other works, and articles and books obtained from an Internet search. Issues discussed are (a) an overview of immersive decision environments; (b) dual-process decision making; (c) training robust intuitive decision making; (d) combining analytical and intuitive processing in immersive environments; and (e) concluding remarks. For the development of robust decision making in immersive environments, intuitive reasoning should be emphasized by creating an immersive situation and by providing for the development of automatic processing through implicit learning, with the latter reinforced by explicit thought processes. Considerations of the literature on decision making will provide insight for future design solutions for immersive decision environments.

20. Acquiring Team-Level Command and Control Skill for UAV Operation

The heart of the CERTT Laboratory, shown in Fig. 1, is a flexible Synthetic Task Environment (STE) that is designed to study many different synthetic tasks for teams working in complex environments. STEs provide an ideal environment for the study of team cognition in complex settings by providing a middle-ground between the highly artificial tasks commonly found in laboratories and the often uncontrollable conditions found in the field or high fidelity simulations.

Developing competency-based methods for near­ real-time air combat problem solving assessment*

Air combat scenarios present unique problems where the solution is not obvious. An advanced networked simulation environment can be used to train high-level cognitive air combat skills such as problem solving. A problem in the development of principled and construct oriented assessment is related to determining the level of specificity of the assessment. We present a detailed discussion of the definition of critical competencies associated with combat mission problem solving performance, and we describe our approach to develop and implement an embedded performance assessment system that maps outcomes to these competencies. Finally, we discuss the implications for our approach for comprehensive assessment and discuss our goals for an evaluation of the competency-based approach to assessment.

Changes in team composition after a break: Building adapative command-and-control teams

An experiment exploring the effects of team composition on the acquisition and retention of team performance and cognitive skill is reported. Team performance was measured in the context of photographing ground targets in an unmanned aerial vehicle synthetic task environment. Team process was taken as a measure of team cognition. Experimental results include the findings that team mixing and longer retention intervals have a short lived deleterious effect on team performance immediately after the interval, while team mixing has a positive effect on team process after the interval. These findings suggest that changes in team composition and retention interval can lead to improvements in team cognition if a brief decrement in team performance post-interval can be afforded. These results are interpreted as perturbation of established coordination patterns due to team mixing leading to more flexible and adaptive teams. Implications for process-oriented research are also considered.

Distributed mission training: teams, virtual reality, and real-time networking

Abstract : Distributed Mission Training (DMT) is a revolutionary team-training paradigm currently evolving at the US Department of Defense, especially in the Air Force. The objective of DMT is to concurrently train people in team efforts involving coordination, communication, and decision making. The teams may not necessarily be collocated and could be engaged in independent as well as coordinated tasks at remote sites. The attached papers are a collection of DMT articles written by personnel of the Air Force Research Laboratorys Warfighter Training Research Division, in Mesa AZ, and published in the September 1999 issue of COMMUNICATIONS of the ACM.

Retention of team coordination skill

Section 1: Introduction and Foundational Issues 1. Introduction Winfred Arthur, Jr., Eric Anthony Day 2. Remembering and forgetting: From the laboratory looking out Scott D. Gronlund, Daniel R. Kimball 3. Complex command-and-control simulation task performance following periods of nonuse Anton J. Villado, Eric Anthony Day, Winfred Arthur, Jr., Paul R. Boatman, Vanessa Kowollik, Alok Bhupatkar, Winston Bennett, Jr. 4. Factors influencing knowledge and skill decay in organizational training: A meta-analysis Xiaoqian Wang, Eric Anthony Day, Vanessa Kowollik, Matthew J. Schuelke, Michael G. Hughes 5. Variance as an indicator of training effectiveness in the context of complex skill acquisition, retention, and transfer Ira Schurig, Winfred Arthur, Jr., Eric Anthony Day, David J. Woehr Section 2: Individual Skill Retention and Transfer on Complex Task with Extended nonuse Intervals, the Factors that Influence it, and how Skill Decay can be Mitigated 6. Improving military readiness: Evaluation and prediction of performance to optimize training effectiveness Tiffany S. Jastrzembski, Antoinette M. Portrey, Brian T. Schreiber, Kevin A. Gluck 7. Training for efficient, durable, and flexible performance in the military Alice F. Healy, Erica L. Wohldmann, James A. Kole, Vivian I. Schneider, Kathleen M. Shea, Lyle E. Bourne, Jr. 8. Complex movement sequences: How the sequence structure affects learning and transfer Charles H. Shea, Attila J. Kovacs 9. Use of, reaction to, and efficacy of observation rehearsal training: Enhancing skill retention on a complex command-and-control simulation task Anton J. Villado, Eric Anthony Day, Winfred Arthur, Jr., Paul R. Boatman, Vanessa Kowollik, Alok Bhupatkar, Winston Bennett, Jr. 10. Skill decay, re-acquisition training and transfer studies in the Swedish Air Force: A retrospective review Erland Svensson, Maud Angelborg-Thanderz, Jonathan Borgvall, Martin Castor 11. Relating individual differences in ability, personality, and motivation to the retention and transfer of skill on a complex command-and-control simulation task Eric Anthony Day, Winfred Arthur, Jr., Anton J. Villado, Paul R. Boatman, Vanessa Kowollik, Alok Bhupatkar, Winston Bennett, Jr. 12. Individual difference variables as predictors of error during multitasking training Elizabeth M. Poposki, Frederick L. Oswald Section 3: Skill Decay and Retention at the Team Level 13. A comparative investigation of individual and team skill retention and transfer on a complex command-and-control simulation task Winfred Arthur, Jr., Eric Anthony Day, Anton J. Villado, Ryan M. Glaze, Matthew J. Schuelke, Paul R. Boatman, Vanessa Kowollik, Xiaoqian Wang, Winston Bennett, Jr. 14. Retention of team coordination skill Nancy J. Cooke, Jamie C. Gorman, Jasmine Duran, Christopher Myers, Dee Andrews 15. Team performance decay: Why does it happen and how to avoid it? Deborah DiazGranados, Elizabeth Lazzara, Rebecca Lyons, Samuel R. Wooten, Eduardo Salas Section 4: Summary 16. A Look aFarr (1987): The Past, Present, and Future of Applied Skill Decay Research Winfred Arthur, Jr., Eric Anthony Day

Training organizational supervisors to detect and prevent cyber insider threats: two approaches

Cyber insider threat is intentional theft from, or sabotage of, a cyber system by someone within the organization. This article explores the use of advanced cognitive and instructional principles to accelerate learning in organizational supervisors to mitigate the cyber threat. It examines the potential advantage of using serious games to engage supervisors. It also posits two systematic instructional approaches for this training challenge – optimal path modelling and a competency-based approach. The paper concludes by discussing challenges of evaluating training for seldom occurring real world phenomena, like detecting a cyber-insider threat.

Accelerated Learning: Prospects, Issues and Applications

An effort is under way to roadmap for investigations aimed at developing robust and broadly-applicable methods for “accelerated learning” (Hoffman, et al., 2009). This includes methods for: (1) Facilitating the acquisition of expertise in mission or organization-critical specializations and (2) Retaining that expertise in the form of both personnel capabilities and organizational knowledge. Achievement of the objective will be made possible through a collaboration of scientists and government specialists in areas of training and expertise studies. Panelists will discuss differing perspectives on the concept of accelerated learning, highlighting prospects, issues, and methodological challenges.

A Decomposition and Guided Simulation Methodology for Large-Scale System Design: A Study in QoS-Capable Intranets with Fixed and Mobile Components

Integrated design of a large-scale distributed system is challenging due to multiple conflicting design objectives, a large number of stochastic parameters, and a combinatorially large design space. Current approaches using decomposition and analysis of isolated subproblems could lead to suboptimization. We develop a framework for integrated design that combines analytical modeling with embedded simulations for large-scale infrastructure planning. The framework uses problem decomposition and a guided simulation methodology, which uses concepts of extrinsic and intrinsic guidance. These are integrated in a comprehensive framework and used to interlink the subproblems and guide the design process towards achieving overall objectives concurrently. A case study demonstrates viability of the framework. The methodology is efficient and flexible, and can be adapted for other problems where resource sharing and integrated system design is critical.