Automated Collaboration Collection&Relationship Understanding Environment

Operations centers for tactical military activities, incident response, and other domains all involve multiple teams of individuals interacting with people and systems within and outside of their organization to enable continuous mission success. In these organizations, effective coordination and collaboration is critical. To improve collaboration, an end-to-end sensor and analysis technology is needed to capture, represent, and analyze interaction patterns. Aptima is developing a data collection and analysis framework to meet this need: ACCRUE, the Automated Collaboration Collection and Relationship Understanding Environment. ACCRUE collects trails of interaction data from sources such as e-mail, text chat, VoIP, and wearable sensors that measure face-to-face contact. ACCRUE analyzes these data with advanced pattern recognition algorithms that match the observed interaction patterns with a library of theoretically-motivated collaboration patterns in the organization. ACCRUE provides analysts, trainers, operations officers, and researchers with an extremely detailed picture of team processes and a systematic mechanism for investigating and interpreting those processes.