Automated Collaboration Collection & Relationship Understanding Environment

Operations centers used for incident response, tactical military activities, and air traffic management can all be characterized as having multiple teams of individuals, each with defined responsibilities, interacting with people and systems within and outside of their organization to enable continuous mission success. Effective coordination and collaboration is critical in these organizations; however, there is as yet no established sensor and analysis technology employed widely that formally captures/represents interactions and allows analysis of coordination. ACCRUE, the Automated Collaboration Collection & Relationship Understanding Environment is envisioned to meet this need. A model of interaction can be developed by construing existing communication tools, such as e-mail and text chat, as sensors of interaction. This model can be enhanced further by incorporating data from wearable sensors which measure face-to-face contact, thereby capturing and representing all critical interactions. Pattern matching algorithms can then be used to identify interactions in the modeled interactions that might be clear exemplars of key coordination activities or indicators of dysfunction. This will allow analysts, trainers, operations officers, and researchers (1) a window into team processes and (2) a systematic mechanism for investigating and interpreting those processes.