IMAGES: Instrument for the Measurement and Advancement of Group Environmental SA

Network centric warfare promises to increase information sharing and allow distribution of decision making. This will improve military effectiveness, but only if the situational awareness (SA) of warfighters is correctly aligned. IMAGES is a software tool that will infer the cognitive states of individuals and groups engaged in cognitive collaboration and measure group SA by exploiting data on the information that team members access and generate. IMAGES takes advantage of the large amounts of communication and report text that naturally occur in collaborative environments. The text generated in the normal course of work is collected and changed into forms that can be compared and analyzed. For example, semantic maps are networks in which the nodes are the concepts discussed and the connections between nodes signify the strength of association between those concepts, and are enriched by meta-data about the individuals/groups authoring the materials (e.g., time composed, references accessed, actions taken/documented). A comparison of networks based on text from several individuals or groups yields information about the similarity of their respective mental models. Differences among maps may reflect misalignments of SA, which can be remedied by information sharing and targeted communication.