Software Agents Can Help Time-Stressed Teams

Roland Piquepaille writes "Penn State researchers have developed software agents which can help human teams to react more accurately and quickly in time-stressed situations than human teams acting alone. According to this news release, the software was tested in a military command-and-control simulation. "When time pressures were normal, the human teams functioned well, sharing information and making correct decisions about the potential threat." But when the pressure increased, the human teams made errors who would have cost lives in real situations. The decisions taken by agent-supported human teams were much better. Now, it remains to be seen if this software can be used in other stressful situations, such as for emergency management operations. Read more for other details, references and illustrations about this project."

Comments

Clippy

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory clippy quote:

"I see you are trying to bomb a school in Iraq. Would you like to use
1) Cluster bombs
2) Napalm
3) Air burst firestorms
4) Nuclear bunker-buster
Select one of these options."

Assisted Operations

[Renraku]

Software assistance isn't so bad when you can click cancel and it takes all of one second out of your life. In a combat situation? What if something outside of the plan happened? Which often does during times of war and/or duress.

Misleading Summary

[VoidWraith]

First of all, the summary doesn't explain anything about what this thing actually does, just that it involves stressful situations.

Even reading the article doesn't make it very clear, but it turns out that this is merely a system for getting information from one person to another more quickly. How this is a headline I do not know.

Re:Cue ceaseless, childish whining in 3...2...1...

[daniil]

I wish to express my pity

And you didn't even need the support of a software agent in making this decision! Rawk!

I look at it this way...

[Announcer]

Anything that can be used to save the lives of our brave young men and women is worth discussing and implementing.

If this software can be set up and used by our Military, even if it only saves *one* life, it will have been worth it.

Re:I look at it this way...

[Jaime2]

Simplistics attitudes like this get in the way of real decision making.

What if by allocating resources to this project, the project to build a resource allocation system for medical personnel is scrapped?

Anyone who says "If it saves only one life..." has turned off their brain. How about this... We take your house and turn it into a homeless shelter (you included). It will save several lives. If we do it to 100 people in 50 cities in colder climates, we can save hundreds of lives in one winter, for almost no money.

The same model works in self defense

[Colin Smith]

If you have to consciously think then you lose. Thinking takes too long. It has to be reflex/muscle memory/autopilot or whatever you want to call it.

Which is why all the repetitive training, the high pressure fighting during practice. And it's also why books and videos though good for imparting information can never help when the real thing happens.

Microsoft gonna get in on this?

[mendaliv]

My god I hope MS doesn't create an Agent for military purposes.

I can see it now...

Looks like you're trying to take out a machine gun nest!
"Hi! I'm Charlene the M-14! I can help you make your assault! Would you like to..."
*Call for helicopter support *Use diversionary tactics *Throw a grenade

Not on my watch

[zappepcs]

I have been part of teams working under pressure, and there is little that I can see of value in a clippy if the team is actually well trained and have worked together.

Human interaction changes dramatically under pressure to perform. Long sentences can become single words or syllables, yet full communication is achieved. An well trained team member begins to anticipate the action of other team members, in ways that clippy cannot do.

The parallel like processing of the human mind still outperforms that of any computer in small paradigms. Even in military situations, no computer application can apply all the relelvant information from other team members and information sources in a way that can replace or even assist in those decisions. If a team member forgets part of their job, it is usually not because s/he is under stress, it is because of lack of training or experience. Substituting computer assistance for training and experience is an EXTREMELY dangerous thing in my opinion, especially where human life is at risk.

Just my two cents.

Re:Not on my watch

[sean23007]

What would be interesting is if the software agent could be programmed/adapted for each individual team. The team uses those single word/syllable communication methods, and the computer is made to understand them (during training exercises). Then, in high-stress situations, when that word/syllable is uttered by one of the teammates, the communication is put into the software system. The computer knows what all the team members collectively knows. Then it is able to make recommendations on course of action that the individual team members might not be able to make, due to the way humans are affected by stress.

The way I see this, it doesn't replace good people, good training, and good exercises, it merely assists the people when they need it. I think it could be interesing. It would only work, however, if it were completely transparent. No little application running outside of their normal software suite that pops up and asks for confirmation. Instead, it should be built into the software they normally use and should alert the user only when it has a recommendation. All users are notified simultaneously, or it could be given only to the team leader, who could have final say over whether the computer recommendation is valid or not.

I can even see this kind of system reducing the stress for teams in these situations.

YES

[Moraelin]

Actually, we already _are_ using software agents to work a lot faster. Compilers, IDEs, frameworks, you name it. That's what they're there for.

Agents to help decision making? Well, that's what syntax highlighting, auto-completion, help files, and other tools in the IDE do for me. They let me decide faster what can I use there.

(Which also addresses the flood of "ugh! they're making Clippy!" posts. There are at least a dozen tools I use every day that aren't Clippy. Just because one tool is retarded, doesn't mean they all are.)

And they _do_ allow us to achieve deadlines that were unthinkable back in the days of coding in hex/octal and counting the bytes by hand.

The problem isn't the reliance on _good_ tools. The problem is, well, bad management. (Including buying the wrong tools, but that's a topic for itself.)

I really hope more managers will read threads like these, because there's one important message there: stressed people make more mistakes. And according to other studies, some of which were linked to by /. too, tired people make more mistakes too.

And between those two, you have the whole picture of what's wrong with 84 hour weeks and other PHB-style management techniques. It's not that programmers aren't soldiers. It's just that humans (programmers, soldiers, etc) are not machines. A computer can work on SETI packets 24x7 and do proportionally more work than 8x5. A human can't.

Since in programming most of the time is spent in debugging and maintenance, not in just typing code, past a point it's exactly that making more mistakes (which need to be debugged... again) and taking weird shortcuts (which will bog down maintenance) that's ending up costing more time than it saves.

Not that I'm setting my hopes too high, though. There are managers which do have a clue, and then there are the PHB's. Those who fall in the second category, well, I just can't see them getting a clue, even if it was written in big letters on a billboard in front of their office.