Charles River Analytics, a developer of intelligent systems solutions, won a contract valued close to $6 million to support Insight, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) initiative to help analysts manage sensor feeds coming in from a variety of platforms and sensors. The goal is to develop and field the next generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) Exploitation and Resource Management system.
“We’ve been selected to lead the Insight technical area that focuses on designing and evaluating a unified human-machine interface (HMI) for analysts,” said Dr. Ryan Kilgore, Principal Scientist at Charles River. “Our effort, named Interfaces for Enhanced Analyst/Automation Collaborative Tasking (INTERAACT) will build tools for human analysts to lend their contextual awareness and ingenuity to a number of exciting, machine-based processing techniques being developed under the Insight program.”
INTERAACT’s objective is to improve the integration of the human analyst’s knowledge, experience, and resourcefulness with Insight’s automated Exploitation and Resource Management (E&RM) System capabilities. This integration will enable the prosecution of many more agile threats than current, largely manual approaches for multi-intelligence cross-cueing and exploitation. It aims to avoid the pitfalls of false assumptions and inadequate context that often plague purely automated solutions to a complex and dynamic problem characterized by uncertainty and adversarial countermeasures.
“This effort highlights Charles River’s unique ability to bring together sound human factors design principles with the capabilities of highly complex computational systems,” said Dr. Jonathan Pfautz, Vice President, Cognitive Systems. “INTERAACT will also let us demonstrate our world-class software engineering skills as we work to integrate our solutions with a variety of ISR hardware and software.”
Charles River is a recognized leader in the design, development, and evaluation of human-machine interfaces for a wide range of decision-support systems. The INTERAACT effort builds upon a number of prior and ongoing successes, such as work on DARPA’s GUARD DOG program, which aims to help soldiers analyze human networks more quickly and identify key figures in real-time. For the GUARD DOG effort, Charles River is designing and implementing the Detection, Explanation, and Prediction of Emerging Network Developments (DEPEND) system that will allow soldiers and intelligence analysts to rapidly discover, monitor, and predict changes in the people, organizations, and events they encounter, providing real-time assessments of threats and vulnerabilities.
For INTERAACT, Charles River is teaming with Oculus Info; BAE Systems; PatchPlus Consulting; and leading human factors researchers, Dr. Ann Bisantz (University at Buffalo), Dr. John Lee (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Dr. Emilie Roth (Roth Cognitive Engineering).
