A Cognitive Immersive Room for Intelligence Analysis Scenarios (CIRIAS)
Authors: Briggs Shannon , Braasch Jonas , Strzalkowski Tomek , Burns Bryan , Chabot Samuel , Sanders Abraham , Al-Hossami Erfan 
Published: June 2023

Intelligence can be understood as the timely delivery of actionable information. Our Cognitive Immersive Room for Intelligence Analysis Scenarios (CIRAS) supports foraging and processing information during time-critical scenarios. Intelligence has an ambiguous meaning and could either refer to the ability to learn and reason well using a logical approach or to use a standard procedure to gather and process public and secret information about an adverse entity (e.g., a foreign country) to forecast threats and opportunities. While the latter definition of intelligence roots in military operations, similar methods have been successfully applied in the civil domain, for example, forensic sciences and corporate business decisions. In this paper, we describe the use of cognitive immersive environments for collaborative decision-making using the general procedures of intelligence analysis, especially the concept of the foraging loop by Pirolli and Card (2005). We focus on three use cases, traffic-pattern analysis, bibliographic search, and travel planning, to explain the benefit of virtual environments for the efficient and time-constrained decision-making process. Each of these examples leans heavily on information-foraging behaviors, which have been historically a bottleneck for intelligence gathering. By leveraging the cognitive immersive technology, we will transfer some of the granular search and sort activities to the system, reducing the cognitive load experienced by users during intelligence tasks. The progressive dialog system paired with our map views allows users to plan points of interest across travel itineraries and allows users to plan routes during challenging traffic. Our brainstorming tool supports text source discovery, allowing users to build a knowledge base, and supports bibliography creation.This approach aids analysis in reducing time and time and effort; timely analysis is typically critical in reconnaissance and other intelligence analyst tasks. During collection and analysis, information has to be pulled from various sources and shared among an expert team. CIRIAS possesses matured technologies to source information through personal interfaces such as computer terminals, handheld devices, and dialog systems while also allowing interfacing between groups of people.The latter is important within the shared context between analysts to allow sharing the most relevant information while deferring other information. To bridge this technology gap, we propose a Situations Room environment that enables small teams to pursue intelligence analyst tasks together. In this room, each member can gather information individually while also exchanging and displaying relevant data among each other on large immersive displays. The room provides immersive audio/visual displays to facilitate this as a shared resource while connecting participants to personal devices. The room tracks participants via gestural and acoustic sensors, displays information in spatial relationships to users and extracts speech information and gestures. An existing audio/visual tracking system provides continuous locations of team members using a 6-camera network and a 16-channel spherical microphone. The latter is also used for speech recognition, and assigns input to individual participants for context-based dialog functions utilizing beamforming and tracking. The system can be adapted to different tasks in a flexible manner, which we will explore during our use case discussion.