DR WATSON II: Document Recommender With Adaptively Tailored Sensing of Needs

Missile Defense Agency (MDA) engineers face a daunting challenge beyond engineering: discovering and leveraging prior context-specific work. A distributed and siloed work environment and myriad data, documents, and artifacts requiring acquisition, navigation, understanding, management, verification, validation, and update are critical contributors to this challenge. The challenge is not merely in the variety and volume of discoverable artifacts but in their provenance, trustworthiness, and value. For example, the age, recency, frequency of use, and the individuals who touched an artifact are clues that often privilege the use of one artifact over another. They may also guide an interested user to a source of current knowledge about the artifact. Yet, such information is typically unavailable. To address these challenges, Aptima is building a virtual assistant called DR WATSON (Document Recommender With Adaptively Tailored Sensing of Needs). DR WATSON will provide informed recommendations to users without adding to their workload. Background processes will sense and respond intelligently to users' requests for information, including but extending beyond traditional entity-type recommendations. Reusing prior work is an adaptive strategy that allows an organization to learn from missteps and extend its most promising insights and capabilities. DR WATSON will help the MDA achieve that objective. Approved for Public Release | 24-MDA-11673 (8 Jan 24)