Personalised Briefing Agents to Improve Situational
                         Awareness

                             Graham S. Horn and Zoë P. Lock

                                          QinetiQ
      Malvern Technology Centre, St Andrews Road, Malvern, Worcestershire, WR14 3PS,
                                    United Kingdom
                           {g.horn, z.lock}@signal.QinetiQ.com



       Abstract. Situational awareness is essential for effective decision making in
       both military and civilian domains. In order to achieve good situational
       awareness a decision maker must be able to access information from a number
       of sources and combine this with his/her current knowledge. The retrieved
       information must be appropriate to the task and role of the user, and be
       presented to him/her in an appropriate manner. Our conjecture is that
       Personalised Briefing Agents can assist users with achieving situational
       awareness by connecting to an Agent-Oriented Information System and using
       user models to provide personalised briefings.


Problem Statement
Situational awareness is a ubiquitous term in the military domain but it is equally
important in civilian domains where crucial decisions must be made. Three widely
accepted critical factors for the development of situational awareness are the
perception of available facts, comprehension of the facts in relation to the individual’s
current knowledge, and the projection of how the situation is likely to develop in the
future [1].

When trying to make a decision, a commander or executive will collaborate with
other members of the team as well as consulting various information sources. This
collaboration and consultation is asynchronous in nature as each member follows
his/her own decision-making cycle. Each member of the group can develop his/her
own situational awareness from their own interactions and experiences. Briefings are
held at staff meetings in order to support the achievement of a shared situational
awareness across all members of the group and to align individuals’ mental models.
Briefings also provide an opportunity to spot conflicts and unexplored opportunities.

The preparation of briefings is a labour-intensive process. The time spent collecting
and collating information and the designing a presentation is not available for other
tasks – which is as important to the business world as it is to the military. Information
overload is an ever-present problem throughout the process. Individuals also have
different information requirements that may not be met by a group briefing; indeed,
there is a risk of overloading the individual with irrelevant information, particularly if
the style of the presentation is inappropriate.


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Proposed Solution
A Personalised Briefing Agent (PBA) will provide its user with a portal onto an
Agent-Oriented Information System (which can in turn provide links to other
systems). The PBA will provide tailored briefings to its user in order to enhance
his/her situational awareness. These briefings will be produced in response to requests
by the user or by the occurrence of events that will affect the user (as predicted by the
user model). A number of PBAs will support the development of shared situational
awareness.

The PBA is an interface agent that will interact with the user through multiple
modalities such as speech, text and graphical displays. The PBA will employ user
modelling to learn about the user and to adapt information filtering/retrieval and
multimedia presentation systems accordingly. Factors that can affect situational
awareness including cognitive stress, communications and training will be included in
the user model.

Research Questions
In order to develop PBAs a number of issues must be considered. Four important
categories that we intend to address in our work are given below.
Interacting with the user
* How should the PBA participate in interactions?
* How can the pattern of interaction / dialogue be used to gather information about
   the user?
Representing the user
* How to capture and represent the information needs of users?
* Which elements of the user model are most important?
Evaluation
* How to judge the effectiveness of the briefing on the situational awareness of the
  user?
* How to measure the value of personalisation?
Architectural design
* Should the PBA be a single agent or a collection of collaborating specialist agents?
* What benefits can be gained by enabling collaboration between the PBAs
  belonging to a group of users?

References
[1] Albert A. Nofi. Defining and Measuring Shared Situation Awareness. Center for Naval
   Analyses. November 2000.

Acknowledgements
This work was carried out as part of the UK Ministry of Defence Corporate Research
Programme.
© Copyright QinetiQ ltd 2002



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