ISX Laboratory

The ISX Laboratory is working to change how analysts and decision makers work in complex domains. We focus on domains like the Intelligence Community and Military Command and Control, where problem solving is dominated by constant and overwhelming inflows of information, uncertainty and ambiguity, and a continuously evolving problem environment. Our research goals focus on improving how distributed communities of users generate a deep understanding of these situations, and generate a shared orientation toward the best decision strategies.

Technologies that play a primary role in our approaches include model-based reasoning; semantic information understanding; and collaboration. Our solutions create vehicles by which individual experts can join forces to combine and magnify their information and work products, interjecting their unique personal expertise, insight and understanding.

Augmenting Human Problem Solving

While bringing experts together offers tremendous power in attacking complex problems, there is also a critical need to augment and amplify human expertise: to bring machine intelligence to the table in ways that compliment human cognitive performance. Our research explores ways in which useful, timely knowledge can be induced from the live streams of information available in networked organizations and operations. Dynamic knowledge sources include data feeds, work products, and collaboration and social media dialog. We strive to capture and apply knowledge extracted from live content and from observing the dialog and behavior of collaborative participants, analysts and decision makers. We explore ways in which that captured knowledge can be exploited to improve human decision making through information visualization, information understanding, and model-based reasoning. Our lab is leading groundbreaking work in the integration of computational social science models into military decision making processes. This work compliments our established position as leaders in applied research in semantic information integration, semantic interoperability, and Semantic Web technologies.

Information Exploitation That Maximizes Human Value

Our Laboratory is organized as two business areas:

Knowledge Discovery and Analytics

Through our research, ISX Lab will enable future teams of analysts and decision makers to tackle difficult multi-disciplinary problems, marshal the best knowledge available, and produce higher quality / higher confidence assessments and plans faster than ever before.

  

Collaborative Decision Informatics

A recent publication from the Command Staff College cites “the shifting nature of warfare that we will face in the future, with its whirlwind tempo, fluidity, and reliance on responsive flexible command and control structures.” Future operations, facing unconventional adversaries, will demand combined capabilities to implement unified command and control of a diverse combined force; to rapidly compose diverse capabilities in innovative ways to achieve the desired effect; and to deliver extreme ops tempo in employing those capabilities. By pioneering and exploiting the technologies that addresses the integration of process, human interaction, and information processing, we can allow for a more dynamic “on-the-fly” ability to support theater and global operations.  

Knowledge Discovery and Analytics

While new and improved sensor systems and ubiquitous computing environments continue to provide exponential growth in the generation of information, no equivalent knowledge understanding techniques have surfaced. This dilemma is exacerbated by the draw-down of staff, and their average experience, in analysis roles in the intelligence community and military.