CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N162-074

Description

Marine Corps Commanders are responsible for consuming, understanding, and acting upon vast amounts of operational data. However, current Command and Control (C2) systems overwhelm Commanders by presenting this data in too much detail, and they lack intuitive interfaces for exploring and querying the data. The resulting cognitive overload and inefficiency increases the risk that Commanders will overlook information critical to making the best decision. Commanders also lack tools that support their reasoning about predicted and hypothetical future situationstools that could enable them to evaluate potential courses of action (COAs) and ask what if questions. To address these problems, we propose to design a C2 Interactive and Context-Aware Digital Assistant (CICADA). CICADA enables Marine Corps Commanders to make sense of large amounts of operational data by issuing natural language commands. CICADA will convert speech input to machine-understandable queries, perform those queries against operational data sources, and return results at the appropriate level of detail. CICADA will be mixed-initiative, proactively issuing alerts to the user when it detects or predicts mission-critical events, and it will process queries about hypothetical and future scenarios to support what-if analysis and COA evaluation.