For this MURI project we have conducted multidisciplinary research aimed at incorporating intelligent assistants into human teams to increase the effectiveness of team decision making in joint planning tasks. The research paradigm of coordination based on developing and maintaining shared mental models provides a common perspective linking the intelligent agents research at Carnegie Mellon University and the task directed orientation to cognitive modeling and information presentation of the University of Pittsburgh. We are also incorporating the research in multi-media information delivery of the Software Engineering Institute, and the team performance studies at the Naval Air Warfare Training Systems Division.

Research from this MURI (1) provides a methodology for cognitive modeling of member and team tasks, (2) provides principles for developing and supporting high performance teams, (3) contributes to the understanding of agent roles and human agent interactions in teams composed of humans and intelligent agents, (4) produces a set of architectural principles and techniques that allow agents to cooperatively inter-operate to provide integrated and adaptable information access, integration and decision support, (5) results in a set of reusable agent structuring components that will allow system developers to rapidly construct new agents for different end-user applications, and (6) provides techniques and tools for creating, visually representing and accessing large scale multimedia, multi-modal information including structured data as well as speech, text, images and video.

Our findings have implications for other types of planning teams that are comprised of multi-disciplinary experts. Examples include civilian emergency response, management, and single service military teams.