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. Can we characterize ordinary team activity and distinguish it from anomalies in need of intervention in real-time? One inroad to addressing this question is to investigate the feasibility of designing a system for monitoring team behavior in real-time, detecting time-phased anomalies, and intervening to increase team effectiveness by capitalizing on a ubiquitous byproduct of teams: communication behavior. During Phase I of the proposed project, we will demonstrate the feasibility of applying 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. A software tool, developed around this concept, could provide real time information to adjust team knowledge, team member assignment and institute corrective action and/or training.