NASA Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports

contemporary team theory, adapted an existing base simulation to mimic many of the crucial details of the task and its
teamwork demands. The DDD simulator is a unique software tool set and computer system developed to study issues of
distributed situation assessment and resource allocation in a dynamic team environment. As of this writing, the authors have
run collected data using the DDD AWACS task and knowledgeable cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy. They are in the
process of demonstrating that it is possible to strike a balance between highly complex, large-scale, high fidelity simulations
on the one hand, and over-controlled, overly simple laboratory research tasks on the other. Results of the research will inform
team theory, system and organizational design, and continued research in the laboratory and field.
DTIC
AWACS Aircraft; Command and Control; Decision Making; Distributed Interactive Simulation; Education; Human
Performance; Mental Performance; Tasks; Teams
20060001837 Air Force Research Lab., Brooks AFB, TX USA
DMT-RNet: An Internet-Based Infrastructure for Distributed Multidisciplinary Investigations of C2 Performance
Entin, Eileen B.; Serfaty, Daniel; Elliott, Linda R.; Schiflett, Samuel G.; Jan. 1, 2001; 13 pp.; In English; Original contains
color illustrations
Report No.(s): AD-A440346; No Copyright; Avail.: Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
The authors describe the first phase of a collaborative research program that leveraged emerging capabilities of the
internet to connect a distributed PC-based synthetic task environment system for the purpose of research in distributed team
training and decision making. Using an internet-based version of the dynamic distributed decision making (DDD) paradigm,
16 participants from four multidisciplinary research groups (Brooks AFB, University of South Florida, University of Central
Florida, and Aptima, Inc.) were connected and performed in a team-on-teams C2 scenario. Observers at the sites viewed
scenario play in real time, and communicated with one another via voice and e-mail. Immediately following the end of
scenario play, team performance assessments were collected, integrated, and distributed back to all participants for use in an
after-action review. This infrastructure will provide the means to investigate issues related to effectiveness in military
distributed mission training (DMT) systems, including integration of training goals; use of constructed forces; training content,
sequencing, and delivery; scenario fidelity; distributed online performance assessment; and interventions to improve learning
and performance in mission planning, execution, and debriefing. The internet-enabled DDD provides a collaborative training
space for investigation of these DMT issues while permitting experimental control, unrestricted data analysis, and cooperative
research across distributed sites.
DTIC
Command and Control; Decision Making; Distributed Interactive Simulation; Education; Internets
20060001850 Massachusetts Univ., Amherst, MA USA
Composition of Conditional Random Fields for Transfer Learning
Sutton, Charles; Mccallum, Andrew; Jan. 1, 2005; 8 pp.; In English
Report No.(s): AD-A440381; No Copyright; Avail.: Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
Many learning tasks have subtasks for which much training data exists. Therefore, we want to transfer learning from the
old, general-purpose subtask to a more specific new task, for which there is often less data. While work in transfer learning
often considers how the old task should affect learning on the new task, in this paper we show that it helps to take into account
how the new task affects the old. Specifically, we perform joint decoding of separately-trained sequence models, preserving
uncertainty between the tasks and allowing information from the new task to affect predictions on the old task. On two
standard text data sets, we show that joint decoding outperforms cascaded decoding.
DTIC
Computer Assisted Instruction; Systems Engineering
20060001858 Aptima, Inc., Woburn, MA USA
Congruence of Human Organizations and Missions: Theory versus Data
Levchuk, Georgiy M.; Kleinman, David L.; Ruan, Sui; Pattipati, Krishna R.; Jan. 1, 2005; 19 pp.; In English; Original
contains color illustrations
Report No.(s): AD-A440392; N00014-00-1-0101; No Copyright; Avail.: Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
In this paper, the authors present a methodology for quantifying the degree of fit between a mission and an organization
based on the closeness between the task structure (i.e., resource requirements and task interdependence) and the Decision
Maker-asset (DM) allocation across the organization (i.e., amount and distribution of resource capabilities among DMs and
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