Interactive surfaces are all around us. If you have ever used a touch-sensitive device, you have used an interactive surface. Today, interactive surfaces offer a plethora of horizontal as well as vertical displays enabling you to collaborate with your team or audience in an innovative way. Our portfolio consists of the following interactive features:
Touch-Sensitive Display Walls
3-D Tabletop Interactive User Interface with Virtual Elastic Objects
Tabletop Map-Based Tasks and Collaboration
Electronic Virtual Transactive Memory (EVTM) introduces a practical application of human‐centric user interfaces, visual analytics, and artificial intelligence solutions for intra‐ and inter‐organizational collaboration and knowledge sharing. EVTM helps people monitor, search, and discover relevant knowledge and experts as well as autonomously establish and maintain knowledge networks across a variety of military, public, and private sector organizations. EVTM is designed to standardize and modularize content in different formats and locations so that it can be easily combined into meaningful collections and shared.
EVTM originated from and co‐evolved at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This innovative technology builds on more than one decade of research in visual analytics and cognitive computing. EVTM is not an off‐the‐shelve product but a combination of various customizable and combinable technology concepts and solutions. The EVTM environment supports and enhances essential knowledge management and networking activities, such as:
EVTM features a variety of graphical user interfaces for monitoring, search, discovery, management, and exchange of content and content collections. EVTM also features an artificial intelligence engine that learns about the expertise, interest, and objectives of individuals to help users detect relevant content and experts and autonomously collect, structure, and distribute content.
EVTM is a visual analytics solution for interagency collaboration. Dashboard views can self-synchronize with dynamic information sources and display interactive content from a subject matter expert. For example, a geographic map that provides real time updates about the current location of operators or relief personnel in the field. This technology and its approach to knowledge acquisition and sharing have tremendous potential if integrated into a global knowledge networking environment.
1. [Follow] - monitoring of recent knowledge such as news, alerts and announcements from various organizational sources and individual contributors. The issue with recent knowledge is that the reliability, validity, and relevance of knowledge are yet to be determined.
2. [Search] - retrieval of more mature knowledge from repositories such as databases, web sites, and social media sites. Mature knowledge is often associated with categories, ratings, and other meta-data that help conduct focused searches and help determine the quality of knowledge. Discovery View displays feeds and search results in a matrix organized by time, relevance, and categories. Workspace View allows users to collect, organize, annotate, share, and discuss content. Agent System infers relations from the spatial organization and exchange use of content.
3. [Interact] - direct and iterative acquisition of knowledge from interacting with individuals. Interactions among individuals with different backgrounds and points of view tend to lead to more creative and in‐depth explorations and interpretations of knowledge.
4. [Construct] - convergence of accumulated knowledge with existing knowledge by determining the relevance of knowledge, the interpretation of knowledge (comprehending, sense making, learning), and the construction of new knowledge.
Multiplayer Online Wargame (MOW) enables collaborative thinking and innovation. Communities of interest are challenged to work together on difficult problems. Players build Ideas and Action Plans together on the Web. MOW has been used nearly 20 times to explore critical problems and expose key thinking that harnesses the “wisdom of the crowd” and provide detailed pros, cons, alternatives and paths forward. Innovation emerges from broad ranges of participation and resulting “knowledge accidents” that combine known ideas in novel ways. MOW carefully protects player anonymity and lets people speak their minds freely.
MOW provides a secure channel and a repeatable resource for frank dialog from any location at any time. In essence, MOW exposes best aspects of workshops and war games online: players are challenged, able to think “outside the box” about new possibilities, and focus on actionable ways forward. MOW extends in-person sessions by allowing distributed participation, making all results searchable, linkable and immediately useful when pursuing follow-on activities.
MOW integrates elements from massive multiplayer online games, alternate reality games, large-number text based collaborative events, geospatial mapping tools, and Web 2.0 collaborative tools, and extends them to scenarios of interest. MOW can be used in a variety of scenarios, many of which have already been described, as a means of accessing relevant bodies of knowledge and then sharing it with a broader audience.
MOW is designed to:
Provide a proven war gaming innovation platform to explore hard challenges;
Link players and educational curricula for career-long engagement;
Extend group analysis with advanced open-source analytics, longitudinal studies, distributed simulation, virtual worlds, and visualization within collaborative team environments;
Play the game, change the game! We expect that the MOW gaming process will not only allow multiple concurrent projects to improve intellectual traction but provide a greater advantage to individuals and groups be enabling sharable expertise in their own personal professional development and initiatives.
Peace Support Operations Modeling (PSOM) includes a cost effective “desk top” approach and the necessary software architecture to provide scenario structure, track cause and effect, and provide a context for the players to work within. It is especially valuable for small team training and can be customized to a variety of operational objectives. While broad in scope, PSOM remains a model for “low cost, high impact, small footprint” training and education tool. PSOM is capable of representing most key actors in a security or stabilization scenario.
Some of the groups represented in previous games include Other Government Departments (OGDs); International Organizations (IOs); Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs); the ‘unaligned’ civilian population, formed military units, police, militia groups, insurgent organizations, private security companies, organized crime groups, narcotics traffickers; etc. It also allows the players to undertake a wide variety of different tasks within the game, including development of key infrastructure, security sector reform, ‘counter transition’ activities, and information operations.
PSOM uses a Strategic Interaction Process (SIP). SIP provides the wider context in which the operational game takes place. It allows the political aspects of an operation to be represented and allows influences outside of the operational theatre to be considered. It is primarily a role-play exercise rather than computer-based but includes a high degree of formal structure to ensure that player intentions and key insights are captured.
The combination of SIP and the operational game allows high-level political aspects of a scenario to be represented and for lower level operational and tactical aspects to be captured. It also helps to reflect the operational impact of strategic decisions, and to demonstrate the strategic impact of tactical and operational actions. The PSOM process has purposefully been designed to represent the “big picture” rather than focusing on detail and is intended to represent a wide variety of aspects of stabilization operations besides only military aspects to include:
1. Development - players can task their units to “build infrastructure” in order to supply key goods and services, such as power, water, food, etc. The model requires players to build the necessary human capacity. PSOM infrastructure is not limited to simple goods; it can also include broader concepts like capacity building.
2. Aid Provision - model allows players to provide short-term palliative aid as a “quick fix” when and where necessary.
3. Economics - model includes a simple representation of economics (i.e., allowing the civilian population to become employed). Employment also includes illicit sector environments such as drug trafficking.
4. Training and Mentoring - group’s capability can be improved through the provision of training and mentoring, allowing them to operate more effectively.
5. Popular Support - one of the key outputs for the model is the level of ‘consent’ or popular support to each of the different actors.
6. Security - the level of security experienced by the civilian population is also calculated and used as an indicator of performance.
7. Threat - PSOM measures the level of threat that the population is experiencing generated through coercive force by actors. PSOM can be a valuable tool for developing relationships, collaboration, and interoperability. For example, in a PSOM game, it is possible to build an administrative capability to include employing and training civil servants from the civilian population and providing the physical working infrastructure.