Human-Machine Interfaces for Coordination Decision Support in Tactical Settings

Natural Interaction Systems, LLC (NIS), its subcontractor, Prof. Sharon L. Oviatt (Oregon Health and Science Uni-versity), and its consultants, Dr. Kay Stanney (Univ. of Central Florida) and Lt. Col. S. Kelly Snapp (U.S. Army, Ret.) are pleased to present this STTR proposal to develop an advanced multimodal interface in support of tactical coordination. Although the military has devoted substantial resources to the generation of plans for a wide range of contingencies, once units deploy, those plans inevitably change. Unfortunately, insufficient technological support has been given to the problem of finding a new joint plan among the deployed units who are affected by those changes. In conjunction with the DARPA/IPTO COORDINATORS Program that is aiming to build software that would support tactical coordination, the proposed effort will address the interface between the dismounted war-fighter and his COORDINATOR, as well as the hardware platform that could host a COORDINATOR agent. The pro-posed effort will also investigate the effect of this interface on the user's cognitive load during coordination tasks, and assess his ability to maintain situation awareness and perform tasks. If successful, the proposed work will pro-vide an extremely useful interface, not only for coordination, but for tactical collaboration of all types. Moreover, the proposed work will also generate a usable interface appropriate to dismounted and mobile settings, a problem that has resisted solution to this day. This STTR effort will transfer dialogue management and interface simulation software to NIS, as well as knowledge of how these interfaces affect users' cognitive load. Finally, the empirical testing methodology has immediate benefits to NIS' developing and assessing many different kinds of mobile inter-faces.