Agent Based Aiding of Human Teams

Teams are a form of organizational structure where the team members engage in information exchanges in order to fulfill team goals. The activities that the team engages in are inter-dependent and usually involve gathering, interpreting and exchanging information; creating and identifying alternative courses of action; choosing among alternatives by considering different viewpoints of team members; choosing among decision alternatives and monitoring the consequences of the decision. Effective teams achieve goals and accomplish tasks that otherwise would not be achievable by groups of uncoordinated individuals. While previous work in teamwork theory has focused on describing ways in which humans coordinate their activities, there has been little previous work on which of those specific activities, information flows and team performance can be enhanced by being aided by software agents. Recent interest in supporting emergency response teams, military interest in operations other than war, and coalition operations, motivates the need for studies that examine agent aiding strategies and their effect on human team performance. This talk will present (a) characteristics and challenges of human teamwork that have not been well studied to date, such as decentralization and self-organization, (b) results of studies of human-only teamwork performance that incorporate these challenges in order to establish a baseline, and (c) identification of fruitful ways for agents to aid human teams with these characteristics. In particular, we will focus on teams that operate in time stressed environments without previous training together. We will also present results of studies where software agents provided decision support for human teams in the performance of a variety of tasks and under different environmental and task constraints. We will close with open challenges and research problems in agent aiding of human teamwork.