Sage: Five Powerful Ideas for Studying and Transforming the Intelligence Analyst's Task Environment

Abstract

Sage provides a scaled world in which real and simulated intelligence analysts work to solve realistic scenarios in innovative task environments. All aspects of Sage are instrumented for data collection and Sage itself is built to facilitate the swapping in and out of prototypes of innovative tools for information search, hypothesis generation, and hypothesis testing. Sage focuses not simply on the promised functionality of these tools, but the way in which the design of the interface supports or hinders the realization of this functionality. Beyond the individual tool and its interface, Sage supports the cognitive engineering of integrated task environments by the use of simulated cyborgs (simBorgs). SimBorgs combine high-fidelity computational cognitive models with low-fidelity artificial intelligence (AI) based reasoning components. This combination of cognitive modeling with AI enables the creation of intelligent agents, simBorgs, that will work tirelessly to perform usability testing on various combinations of tasks and interfaces.