C2-ASSIST: A Command and Control Assistant for Marine Commanders

Information flow is central to effective command and control. As technologies continue to evolve in communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, there is a growing wealth of information available to the commander. This abundance of information can be underutilized given the operational tempo. What is needed are command tools with capabilities that assist commanders with timely synthesis of information relevant to the decisions at hand, while minimizing the burden of distraction from excess information. We propose to build the Command and Control Assistant for Marine Commanders (C2-ASSIST), leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) techniques currently used in digital assistants to assist commanders with battlespace decision making.The C2-ASSIST system will integrate with existing command tools and perform filtering, searching, and synthesis on large amounts of data. C2-ASSIST will find information relevant to current tasks and questions, predict impacts of the existing data on future plans, and automate complex tasks.During Phase I we will identify the requirements of the system to be built; define how C2-ASSIST will integrate with existing user interfaces and data sources; select the existing algorithms, tools, and libraries that will complete the required tasks and requests; develop and evaluate a prototype; and develop the Phase II system design.