Benjamin Bell

Eduworks

Analysts across the intelligence community (IC) face rapid growth in the volume of data to be transformed into intelligence. Dramatic growth in open source intelligence (OSINT) is being driven by digital news outlets, blogs, and social media, particularly in conflict zones that lack traditional infrastructure and communications networks. At the sam...

Flight simulation is a proven technique for training technical and procedural skills, but team skills present needs that remain unmet by simulator technology. Communication and coordination, two skills representative of this gap, are typically incorporated into simulation via human role players, a practice that entails cost, introduces variation, a...

Simulation is facing new challenges brought on by urgent training needs in areas that stretch the capabilities offered by conventional simulation techniques. Training for non-kinetic skills such as cultural awareness, communication and team coordination is increasingly important but is seldom adequately addressed by simulation. We will postulate so...

Simulation devices have historically emphasized individual skills training, and are seldom designed to provide, as part of the simulated experience, the user’s interactions with other members of a crew or team. Despite this limitation, use of simulation for training in complex engineering environments is widespread and enjoys a great deal of user a...

Assessing team performance is a difficult task for instructors because of factors such as high workload. Automated performance measurement systems may provide assistance to instructors and improve the quality of performance assessment. However, little research is available to guide such interventions or to document their effects. This research comp...

Through an integration of synthetic agents, intelligent tutoring, and scenario-based training in a simulation environment, Synthetic Teammates for Real-time Anywhere Training and Assessment (STRATA) is being developed to overcome conventional training limitations by providing deployable training that offers on-demand practice for individuals and te...

Current practices in team training rely either on coordinated scheduling of personnel local to a base or ship (which limits the availability, breadth, and consistency of training), or on TDY training at a dedicated facility (which presents few opportunities, risks rapid skill degradation, and incurs high costs). To overcome these limitations we are...

Understanding interactions among team members is critical for developing effective team-level training systems and for designing responsive decision support technologies. Communications among team members under exposure to various stressors is a research area that has received substantial experimental attention. Sustained access to human subjects,...

The AAAI-2002 Fall Symposium Series was held Friday through Sunday, 15 to 17 November 2002 at the Sea Crest Conference Center in North Falmouth, Massachusetts. The five symposia in the 2002 Fall Symposia Series were (1) Chance Discovery: The Discovery and Management of Chance Events; (2) Etiquette for Human-Computer Work; (3) Human-Robot Interactio...

Military and domestic security analysts and planners are facing threats whose asymmetric nature will sharply increase the challenges of establishing an adversary's intent. This complex environment will severely limit the capabilities of the classic doctrinal approach to diagnose adversary activity. Instead, a more dynamic approach is required - adv...

Operators of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) will face multiple, complex, co-occurring tasks, including mission planning, command and control, communications, payload control, and coordination with other assets. This workload is multiplied as single operators begin to control multiple UAVs. Developing appropriate decision support tools for the operato...

Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB) is a pre- dominantly "gray matter-based" fusion and information syn- thesis process conducted to predict possible future adversary courses of action. The purpose is to understand where the enemy is in the battlespace, and to infer what we believe he will do next. From that understanding, military co...

In this paper we describe a human factors approach to decision support systems design, called Crew Intent Inference, that shifts the focus from the automation systems to the user. Systems that generate expectations of the crew's intent can provide enhanced decision support in numerous ways, among which is better aircrew coordination. We discuss cre...

Applications that have access to user intent and task context can support better, faster decision-making on the part of the user. In this paper, we present AUTOS, an approach to the implementation of individual and team intent inference. AUTOS uses observable contextual clues to infer current operator task state and predict future task state. Guide...

This article presents a study designed to assess the impact of technology integration on teachers and students. To carry out the study, ALPINE, a web-based science project aimed at teaching students fundamental weather concepts, data gathering and processing techniques, decision-making, and problem-solving was employed. The investigation of teacher...

and to use resources at that node. At EMAA's core lies a Dock that provides an execution environment for agents, handles incoming and outgoing agent transfers, and con- trols agent access to services. EMAA allows users to define agents, services, and events. Under the EMAA framework, agents are built from small, easily reused tasks that combine to...

Not Available

Intent inference is an approach to developing intelligent user interfaces in which the intentions of the user are inferred and tracked. An intent-aware application can proactively initiate tasks likely to be useful to the user in the current context, for instance, by collecting available data relevant to a decision the user must make. The utility o...

Listen-Communicate-Show (LCS) is a new paradigm for human interaction with data sources. We integrate a spoken language understanding system with intelligent mobile agents that mediate between users and information sources. We have built and will demonstrate an application of this approach called LCS-Marine. Using LCS-Marine, tactical personnel can...

There are more and more computer-based training and tutoring systems each year. In this panel, we will consider device or procedure-oriented instruction such as how to operate a piece of equipment, as opposed to conceptually-oriented instruction such as pure mathematics. We will be identifying what methodologies exist for developing tutors in these...

Stories occupy a central role in training and instruction, and in many professional contexts is an intrinsic element in the enculturation and education of novice practitioners. “War stories” are valuable pieces of information that experienced mentors share with trainees, and when appropriately selected, can illustrate a concept when the learner is...

As technological approaches to instruction become more widely available (and expected), developers have turned to authoring tools as a solution to two classic problems: (1) how can software be produced more easily and rapidly; (2) how can teacher practitioners and instructional designers create sophisticated, technology-enhanced curriculum material...

Several questions have emerged surrounding the design of authoring tools for instructional software that have helped frame an on-going dialog within the community. One such question is how specific or customized an authoring tool should be with respect to the range of applications it can support. One project that comes down on the side of specifici...

The complexities of building educational software can be reduced by relying on appropriate tools for adapting and re-using similar, previous applications. Although researchers have been creating tools for automating some aspects of software design, most of these tools typically aim for generality, attempting to cover a broad class of interactive pr...

We introduce an architecture for constructivist learning that engages students in the task of creating individual exhibitions by drawing from objects in an online collection. This "Virtual Gallery" framework allows students to create 3-dimensional exhibits that can be publicly shared. To assist educators in creating such environments, we are constr...

We describe Goal-Based Scenario Builder, a prototype model-based authoring tool for multimedia educational software, intended for teachers and curriculum designers.

Creating educational software generally requires a great deal of computer expertise, and as a result, educators lacking such knowledge have largely been excluded from the design process. Recently, researchers have been designing tools for automating some aspects of building instructional applications. These tools typically aim for generality, resul...

Outside school, people typically learn during their experiences while addressing desired goals. The Goal-Based Scenario (GBS) framework describes computer-based learning environments that exploit this simple fact. In this article, we propose a structure and a set of design criteria for learn-by-doing environments that enable students to work toward...

Goal-Based Scenarios (GBSs) provide a framework for the design of instruction—a framework in which the student plays a role within a simulation, acquiring knowledge and skills in the process of pursuing a meaningful goal within the simulation context. Sickle Cell Counselor, a computer program designed to teach museum visitors about sickle cell dise...

A hypermedia simulation, Sickle Cell Counselor, has been developed to anchor instruction for museum visitors using the task of advising couples about the decision to have children when there is a substantial genetic risk of sickle cell disease. A visitor can perform simulated laboratory tests and ask questions via interactive video. The anchored in...

Without Abstract

At each level of an image understanding hierarchy, knowledge and image operators are represented to a different degree of abstraction. Operators may be selected according to current knowledge, and can further be tailored to the specific task by deriving appropriate values of their parameters. We describe a logic programming image understanding envi...

The added functionality such as contour tracking and corner detection which logic programming lends to standard image operators is described. An environment for implementing low-level imaging operations with Prolog predicates is considered. Within this environment, higher-level image predicates (contour tracking and corner detection) are constructe...

The size of the basins of attraction around fixed points in recurrent neural nets (NNs) can be modified by a training process. Controlling these attractive regions by presenting training data with various amount of noise added to the prototype signal vectors is discussed. Application of this technique to signal processing results in a classificatio...

Active interfaces that act as infomediaries between underlying systems and their human users offer a rich and comprehensive solution to the pervasive problem of (lack of) usability in computer-based work environments. However, they also pose a substantial technological challenge. The paper describes a novel work-centered active interface architectu...

Enhancing Performance through Improved Coordination (EPIC) is an approach to improving team performance that emphasizes identifying potential threats to coordination such as heavy workload, accelerated op tempo, or off- nominal states. Our long-term interest is in creating a coordination-aware system to promote better team performance by modeling s...

Thesis (Ph. D., Computer Science)--Northwestern University, 1996.