APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Groups in network-centric environments are faced with many challenges including distribute

Description

Groups in network-centric environments are faced with many challenges including distributed collaboration, decen-tralized decision-making, and dynamic changes in team membership. The team literature provides evidence that these challenges impede the development of optimal team states (composed of trust, cohesion, shared mental mod-els, etc.), ultimately influencing a team"s ability to share mission-critical information and successfully execute mis-sions. To provide teams and military leaders with a system that first detects when factors comprising the team"s state, such as lack of Trust, threaten the flow of mission-critical information and then suggests mitigation strategies for improving the team"s state, Aptima proposes A-TEAMM: Advanced Team Effectiveness through Automated Model-based Mitigation. The A-TEAMM system will use local agents to monitor communications and use Aptima"s language processing and network analysis methods to extract communication measures related to a team"s emergent state. These measures will provide inputs to A-TEAMM"s epidemiological models of how emergent team state affects the spread of mission-critical information. Each team will have an agent that monitors its status and alerts leaders if interpersonal dynamics may be inhibiting the flow of information. The team agents will also identify effective strategies for supporting cooperative behavior and steering teams toward better global results.