DoD Looks to the Mind for Better Design

Via Wired.com -

The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking.

Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops.

"Computers today, you have to learn how they work," says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. "We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you."

So much of what's done today in the military involves staring at a computer screen -- parsing an intelligence report, keeping track of fellow soldiers, flying a drone airplane -- that it can quickly lead to information overload. Schmorrow and other Augmented Cognition (AugCog) researchers think they can overcome this, though.

The idea -- to grossly over-simplify -- is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer's display, to compensate. If a person's getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually -- in a chart or map.

At Boeing Phantom Works, researchers are using AugCog technologies to design tomorrow's cockpits. The military expects its pilots to someday control entire squads of armed robotic planes. But supervising all those drones may be too much for one human mind to handle unassisted.

Boeing's prototype controller uses an fMRI to check just how overloaded a pilot's visual and verbal memories are. Then the system adjusts its interface -- popping the most important radar images up on the middle of the screen, suggesting what targets should be hit next and, eventually, taking over for the human entirely, once his brain becomes completely overwhelmed.