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Defence and Security Accelerator

Defence and Security AcceleratorDefence and Security Accelerator

Challenge 3 – military contextLt Col Shaun Lamb MBE

Challenge 3: Revolutionise the human information relationship for Defence an Army

perspective

Challenge 3 To make effective use of operator cognitive capacity, particularly by human-machine teaming Key points for the Land Environment• considerable improvements need to be made in the interaction between people

and systems• develop approaches that enable collaborative decision making and

intelligence analysis to support planning activities and military operations

Real world considerations• we start from a brownfield site• need to straddle multiple branches• data is everywhere but what matters most?• there is no intelligence but information of specific value• essential enabling conditions & foundations?• we are we are still talking about the chaos of war• our enemies have a very real vote• our ability to operate over degraded networks and

federated command and control

Mission threads

• look beyond information exchange requirements (IERs)

• gaps in our staff process/approach• information must be treated and

consumed as an essential service• must be command-driven and

anticipatory

Human information interaction

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How can I (and my team):• rapidly and intuitively locate key information for my role• indicate that certain information is important, and why and when so

I can find it again• record/create information without worrying where it is located and

not being able to find it again• record key relationships between information• understand accuracy and provenance• be told if I need to know but don’t have permission to access • prevent being swamped by the scale and complexity of available

information

Wider Defence Lines Of Development (DLOD) considerations

• personnel – what key skills and experience do we develop?• doctrine – can we conceptually keep pace? • infrastructure - What is the technology readiness level (TRL)

‘aiming point’?• training

• individual, professional and collective burden?• TRAIN AS WE FIGHT

• interoperability – designed in at the outset

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Defence and Security Accelerator

Defence and Security Accelerator

Challenge 3 – technical detailPeter Houghton

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Aims

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Obtain and exploit innovative ideas that:• Ensure that human cognitive capacity (which is limited) is applied to

those parts of military problems that humans can undertake best

• Reduce unnecessary consumption of human cognitive capacity on activities better supported by automation

• Achieve the above by ensuring that human and automated parts work effectively in unison avoiding pitfalls and problems

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Human limitations

• limited attention capacity• limited short term memory capacity• difficulty with rapid recall• difficulty in spotting patterns spread out over time• “law” of least cognitive effort• many cognitive biases• intuition and probability/statistics often conflict

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Typical limits of current automation• No self awareness

• Typically have static behaviours• Can’t innovate, work or generalise

to select appropriate approaches or generate new ones

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Human-machine teaming areas

1. memory2. reasoning3. relevant roles4. individual and team Interaction

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Memory

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Record and recall important information

Interested in solutions to aid• rapid recall and finding

related information• augmented human memory

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Reasoning

Record and process reasoning related information• represent/store questions, hypotheses, assumptions and

uncertainties• continuously check reasoning against incoming data stream• apply reasoning to generate new findings, create new

questions and hypotheses etc.

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Relevant roles

Illustration by Andrew Rae

Tendency to automate everything or roles which humans can do better

• for example abstraction, pattern matching across diverse input, self assessment/reflection, idiosyncrasy, creativeness

Interested in• novel approaches which demonstrate more appropriate assignment

of relevant tasks/roles to human and machine• approaches which keep human interested, engaged and workload at

appropriate level (no under/overload)

Overall Concept• team design based on SQEP of human and machine parts

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Individual and team interactionTendency to stove-pipe human machine tasks/roles

• no effective team-working between human and machine• teaming ‘capacity/behaviours’ is difficult

Interested in solutions that• improve interworking based on a equivalent team member interaction

concept• exploit team contextual information• dynamically vary what human/machine parts are doing

•Overall concept• augment human teams with machine team members

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SummaryWe are interested in solutions:

• which take account of team context• that don’t increase training load, are intuitive to use, and adoptable by

non-experts operating in stressful environments• that can start small and simple, have rapid application, but have the

potential to scale upWe are not interested in solutions:

• that replace the human component or relegate role of the human• which fail to take account of identified automation pitfalls• which might force people into unnatural ways of operating• that are stand-alone human machine interaction technologies

Joint Warfare DirectorateJoint Warfare Directorate

Summary

• challenges applicable across Defence• competition split into 3 challenges but solutions will

sit across the challenges• interested in how we win through adapting our

processes, people and technology• trying to ensure we don’t fight a fair fight