Cognitive Adaptation of Management Behavior of Information via Observation (CAMBIO) Navy SBIR FY2014.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2014.1 Topic No.: N141-071 Topic Title: Cognitive Adaptation of Management Behavior of Information via Observation (CAMBIO) Proposal No.: N141-071-0673 Firm: Boston Fusion Corp. 1 Van de Graaff Drive Suite 107 Burlington, Massachusetts 01803-5176 Contact: Connie Fournelle Phone: (617) 583-5730 Web Site: www.bostonfusion.com Abstract: Increases in data volume and diversity place disproportionate burden on decision makers, who must manually manage datasets with tools that are insensitive to their missions, tasks, and objectives. In time-critical situations, information management is more likely to consume decision makers' time and attention than facilitate their analysis. In response, Boston Fusion proposes to design and develop an adaptive workflow management system that flexibly responds to a user's current tasking, information needs, and cognitive ability to interpret information. The system will learn, both actively (from user inputs) and passively (from user behaviors), what users need under different scenarios. We will:  Provide a traceable suite of data preparation and exploration functions, enabling users to easily navigate their own workflows, and compose automated workflows for reuse. The system will learn from these traces how users invoke operations to manage information.  Build task-centric models of decision maker information needs, to predict immediate data management needs, and to respond to shifts that trigger changes in information management needs.  Characterize cognitive state and state changes of decision makers, to automatically adapt levels of automation, system guidance, and complexity in information presentation to match the user's specific information needs. Benefits: We will produce an adaptive workflow management system that learns from users over time to determine how to automate information management and presentation activities to best suit the needs and cognitive state of its users-employing the right level of automation to prepare/present the right information to the right user at the right time. The Phase I effort will demonstrate the feasibility of learning decision makers' information management needs by observing and tracking their workflow composition process, and triggering updates in content and presentation based on changes to the environment and user cognitive state. Specific outputs include: 1. Description of the state of the art in cognitive workflow adaptation, and approaches to predicting user tasking and associated information management needs in dynamic environments; 2. A Prototype System Design describing high-level implementation for a task-centric information management system that provides user composable data management tools, and adapts to users' changes in environment or cognitive context; 3. An Evaluation Plan, preliminary results, and documentation to describe the effectiveness and adaptability of our proposed system, and methods for evaluation in Phase II; and a 4. Prototype Demonstration, showing (in the Phase I Option) early system capabilities and feasibility of the proposed approach for producing an adaptive information management system in Phase II. Return