Researchers granted patent for system that fuses human and computer intelligence

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. In complex crisis situations involving military situation awareness, homeland security and other time-sensitive scenarios, teams of experts must often make difficult decisions within a narrow time frame. However, voluminous amounts of information and the complexity of distributed cognition can hamper the quality and timeliness of decision-making by human teams and lead to catastrophic consequences. Two professors from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), John Yen and Michael McNeese, along with Xiacong Fan, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State Behrend, and Shuang Sun, who received a doctorate from the College of IST in 2006 and is now a project manager at Attune Cytometric Software, have devised a system that merges human and computer intelligence to support decision-making in crisis situations. They were recently awarded a U.S. patent for a collaborative intelligent agent framework that, according to Yen, "finds the sweet spot that combines machine intelligence working in tandem with human intelligence." "I think this patent being granted is not only an encouragement of our research, but it's also timely," he said. Yen, McNeese, Fan and Sun were awarded U.S. patent number US 8,442,839, "Agent-based Collaborative Recognition-Primed Decision Making." The patent application describes the concept of using a framework, Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork (CAST), originally developed by Yen and his students, and enhancing that with a recognition-primed decision (RPD) model, thereby enhancing analysis through linking and sharing information using knowledge and experience distributed among team members.