Dylan Schmorrow

Augmented Cognition Overview: Improving Information Intake under Stress

Military operators are often put into complex human-machine interactive environments shown to fail when stressful situations are encountered. To enhance warfighter readiness and operational capability, DARPAs efforts in Augmented Cognition are developing a new generation of technologies to enable computational systems to adapt to the humans cognitive state in real-time. These augmented systems will be endowed with non-invasive sensors that provide objective measures of the warfighters neurophysiological responses to ongoing events. Based on these measures, as well as cognitive and contextual models of the users intentions and objectives, these systems will invoke validated mitigation strategies to enable maximal performance from the user, and to help return them to an optimally functional state. This panel provided an overview of the key components of an Augmented Cognition system, how its development and validation will be carried out, and where these technologies could be implemented both in military settings and beyond.

Perceptive user interfaces workshop

One of the shortcomings of traditional human-computer interaction is its failure to be tailored specifically for human cognition. Human cognition has particular virtues and limitations; designing interfaces to maximize the virtues and bolster the limitations could produce substantial gains in information management capability. These cognition-centric design principles strive to move beyond mere human-computer interaction and towards human-computer symbiosis – a catalytic marriage between the heuristic-driven, contextsensitive powers of human cognition and the detail-oriented, data crunching might of computer computation. This symbiosis becomes feasible due to progress made during the “Decade of the Brain” in expanding the understanding of brain mechanisms and introduction of novel non-invasive assessment tools (such as fMRI), the ongoing “Cognitive Revolution” in behavioral science producing advances in the science of problems solving, reasoning, and decision making, and the growth of digital technologies in pure computing power, miniaturization and ruggedization, data mining sophistication, and evolving advancements in robust input/output devices. These advances produce four significant content domains: multimodal interaction, shared context, interested management, and a new generation of human factors issues. Traditional computer systems rely almost solely on visual information (with a meager auditory component) – future systems will be inherently multimodal, relying on all sensory and motor processing channels for receiving and conveying information. Traditional computer systems also are restricted because humans and computers operate within different contexts – computers are wholly unaware of cues that humans give the highest priority or how to capitalize on those cues to help humans better process information. Similarly, computers lack the ability to truly ‘serve’ the user and determine what information in an environment should be omitted, what should be highlighted, and what should be portrayed with accuracy (and what determines sufficient accuracy). Finally, the advent of these new tools in the human and computer domain requires a new generation of human factors design issues be addressed. Our panel has LCDR Dylan Schmorrow acting as Chair. LCDR Schmorrow is the program officer for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency Information Technology Office’s “Augmented Cognition” program. LT Jim Patrey will act as cochair; LT Patrey is the Director of International Programs for DARPA’s “Augmented Cognition” program. The proposed panel will each address one of the four content areas identified as significant within “Augmented Cognition.” Dr. Phil Cohen of the Center for Human Computer Interaction will address issues of multimodality. Dr. Denny Proffitt will discuss the value of context as an augmentation tool. Dr. Mike Zyda, of the

New Kids on the Block: Multi-Dimensional Perspectives on Augmented Cognition

This discussion panel was organized to offer HFES members an opportunity to learn more about the burgeoning field of Augmented Cognition and to discover the multi-dimensional aspects of the discipline. The session will feature six invited panelists who were selected to represent a cross-section of the Augmented Cognition International Society community of more than 900 members. Each panelist will present their unique perspective of the AugCog field, which will provide the audience with information on a variety of research, development, and application areas in the AugCog field within the U.S and abroad. The panel members and their associated AugCog perspectives include: CDR Dylan Schmorrow, government; Denise Nicholson, academia; Dennis McBride, non-profit; Kay Stanney and Chris Berka, industry; and Blair Dickson, industry/international.

Assessing and Enhancing Team Training Technologies: From the Lab to the Field:

The primary goal of any training system is to enhance performance on the real world tasks it simulates (Lathan et al., 2002). The principal benefit that Virtual Environment (VE) systems have over field exercises and similar real world training is that VEs present training situations that would be too hazardous or too costly to reproduce in the real world (Rose, Attree, Brooks, Parslow, Penn & Ambihaipahan, 2000). As compared with Legacy type systems or physical mockups VEs also afford a smaller footprint and greater reconfigurability to support a variety of training tasks (Cohn, Helmick, Meyers & Burns, 2000). An additional, relatively unexplored benefit of VE, is the potential ease with which they can be implemented to train team tasks. This panel will investigate the utility of using VE for team training, addressing both theoretical and practical concerns.