Adaptable Toolkit for the Assessment and Augmentation of Performance by Teams in Real Time (ADAPTER)

ABSTRACT: Full-spectrum cyber operations, including both Cyber Network Attack and Cyber Network Defense, place enormous cognitive demands on operators and teams. When demands are too high or tasks are not properly allocated, performance degrades, and missions may fail. To avoid operator overload, the USAF requires a thorough, real-time evaluation of the state of the individual and the team. Assessments of behavioral, neurophysiological, and physiological signals that correlate with individual and team performance can provide the information necessary to evaluate state and optimize team performance. To address these challenges, Charles River Analytics has demonstrated the feasibility of an Adaptable Toolkit for the Assessment and Augmentation of Performance by Teams in Real Time (ADAPTER), which provides a framework that flexibly integrates both current and emerging sensors, and fuses sensor data to assess performance. We propose a Phase II effort to refine and expand ADAPTER, enabling comprehensive and holistic characterization of team performance. Our effort combines time-synchronized sensors with advanced modeling techniques that will help experimenters create and use models that support research on performance and the development of augmentation strategies. The effort also includes prototype capabilities to enable experimenters to monitor the results of experiments and enact augmentation strategies in real time. BENEFIT: ADAPTER will benefit US Air Force and USCYBERCOM Cyber Operations (as well as those organizations that design and develop tools for Cyber Operations) by improving their ability to assess operator and team states and dynamically apply strategies to optimize performance. ADAPTER will enable the efficient development and evaluation of operator and team state models that will facilitate laboratory research on operator and team performance, and will be deployable directly into AFRL/RH labs to facilitate research on cyber operators and cyber teams. ADAPTER technologies will also further the development of our commercial AgentWorks toolkit, integrating it with a range of sensor devices to increase its appeal for performance assessment and other real-time sensing applications.