HUMAN MACHINE TEAMING FOR REDUCTION OF OPERATOR COGNITIVE LOAD

DoD users have a high cognitive load to accomplish all their simultaneous tasks on various mission threads. In order to relieve a portion of this cognitive load, program offices are working with users to identify specific cognitive loads that the human would like to offload to the machine. The machine would act as an Artificial Intelligence Decision Support System (AI-DSS), providing answers, recommendations, and the like back to the operator. This enables the human to focus on tasks only humans can currently accomplish based on complexity, policy, and/or trust. The goal of this effort is to enable a machine to understand real world objects, their interactions, mission goals, legal/policy/doctrinal/physical constraints, the environment and other categories from which inference can be reached to establish a knowledge representation where the machine can provide decision support. This will reduce user’s cognitive load, reduce the human decision space, and potentially accelerate Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop and mission accomplishment, while potentially reducing uncertainty.