Dynamical Modeling of Communications for Assessment and Enhancement of Team Performance

Defense transformation and network-centric operations have created a need for highly-responsive, networked teams of individuals. Individuals on those teams each contribute a unique but complementary sets of skills and knowledge (and multicultural backgrounds), but a major challenge in forming teams is getting those individuals to function as an efficient, integrated unit. There exists a challenge to develop a toolset for monitoring team behavior in real-time, detecting time-phased anomalies, and intervening to increase team effectiveness. One inroad to addressing this question is to use a ubiquitous byproduct of teams: communications. In Phase I, we showed the feasibility of discriminating between normal team activity and anomalous team activity using dynamical modeling of team communications. Specifically, we applied dynamical modeling to real-time communication flow data (i.e., who is talking to whom, when, and for how long) for the purpose of assessing, in real-time, team synchronization and shared understanding. In Phase II, we propose to continue to refine this approach, validate the dynamical model results, and determine the effectiveness of the method. In Phase II we will develop and advanced prototype of the tool capable of being implemented it in dynamic team settings.