Pentagon Preps Mind Fields-computers than can scan your mind & adapt 2 what you're thinking.

July 9, 2007

scan your mind & adapt 2what you're thinking. Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm,has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 mil effort 2build prototype cockpits,missile control stations & infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, & adjust how they present information, accordingly.

Pentagon Preps Mind Fields

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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0%2C72996-0.html

By Noah Shachtman| Also by this reporter

05:00 AM Mar, 21, 2007

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 push 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.

Boeing's AugCog prototype cockpit is meant to help pilots control squads of killer drones.

Photo: Jeff Corwin Photography, Boeing Company

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.

Honeywell took a similar approach in recent trials, helping test subjects navigate through a simulated urban battle zone. They avoided enemy ambushes and evacuated wounded colleagues, all while a stream of messages poured on to their handheld computers. EEG meters, attached to subjects' heads, slowed the messages down when the subjects became overwhelmed. Average medical evacuation times were sped up by more than 300 percent, and ambushes dropped by more than 380 percent, as a result.

Zack Lynch, executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, says he's a bit suspicious of the claims because the improvements sound almost too dramatic. But "all in all, there are clearly tremendous advances" being made under the AugCog program, he notes in an e-mail. "(

That progress) will bring benefits well outside the defense community," he says.

"All you have to do is imagine what Wall Street will do when they get their hands on technology that can increase trading performance."

The Boeing and Honeywell teams were two of many groups presenting last October in San Francisco, when 75 or so neuroscientists, human-computer interface specialists and military researchers gathered in a Union Square hotel for the second Augmented Cognition International conference.

(Other gadgetry included a morphing, brain-monitoring Tomahawk missile controller, a software assistant for a ship's captain, and a next-gen simulator of Marine squads.)

Schmorrow, a skinny, affable, mile-a-minute Navy pilot with five graduate degrees from computer science to experimental psychology, served as both emcee and the ringmaster, buzzing around the conference room.

Schmorrow's vision is "AugCog everywhere" -- alarm clocks that sense where you are in your sleep cycle, Blackberries that don't vibrate when you're in a meeting.

"With technology, we're constantly interrupting people, burdening people," Schmorrow explains. "My phone is ringing, my Blackberry is buzzing, I've gotten 20 e-mails since we started talking. We just want people to be able to focus. Give them a bit of peace."

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