COLAB: A Laboratory Environment for Studying Analyst Sensemaking and Collaboration

Abstract : COLAB is a laboratory for studying tools that facilitate collaboration and sensemaking among groups of human analysts as they build interpretations of unfolding situations based on accruing intelligence data. The laboratory has three components. The Hats Simulator provides a challenging problem domain involving thousands to millions of agents engaged in individual and collective behaviors, a small portion of which are terrorist. The second component, the AIID Bayesian blackboard, is an instrumented working environment within which analysts collaborate to build their interpretation of the problem domain. The third component is a web based user interface that integrates the Trellis hypothesis authoring and management tool with a query language to allow human analysts to interact with AIID and each other. Looking to the big picture, COLAB is not merely a laboratory for studying collaboration and shared knowledge creation. COLAB is a tool to explore and develop the analyst working environment of the future, in which analyst tools and methods for collaboration in edge organizations are developed and tested. We present COLAB and its components and outline our plans for the system.

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