Interdependent Human-Machine Teams: The Path to Autonomy

About

William Lawless is professor of mathematics and psychology at Paine College GA. For his PhD topic on group dynamics he theorized about the causes of tragic mistakes made by large organizations with world-class scientists and engineers. After his PhD in 1992 DOE invited him to join its citizens advisory board (CAB) at DOEs Savannah River Site (SRS) Aiken SC. As a founding member he coauthored numerous recommendations on environmental remediation from radioactive wastes (e.g. the regulated closure in 1997 of the first two high-level radioactive waste tanks in the USA). He is a member of INCOSE IEEE AAAI and AAAS. His research today is on autonomous human-machine teams (A-HMT). He is the lead editor of seven published books on artificial intelligence. He was lead organizer of a special issue on human-machine teams and explainable AI” by AI Magazine (2019). He has authored over 85 articles and book chapters and over 175 peer-reviewed proceedings. He was the lead organizer of twelve AAAI symposia at Stanford (2020). Since 2018 he has also been serving on the Office of Naval Research's Advisory Boards for the Science of Artificial Intelligence and Command Decision Making. Ranjeev Mittu is the branch head for the Information Management and Decision Architectures Branch within the Information Technology Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). He leads a multidisciplinary group of scientists and engineers that conduct research and advanced development in visual analytics human performance assessment decision support systems and enterprise systems. Mr. Mittus research expertise is in multi-agent systems human-systems integration artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning data mining and pattern recognition; and he has authored and/or coedited nine books on the topic of AI in collaboration with national and international scientific communities spanning academia and defense. Mr. Mittu received a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1995 from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD. Don Sofge is a computer scientist and roboticist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) with 33 years of experience in artificial intelligence machine learning and control systems R&D. He leads the Distributed Autonomous Systems Group in the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI) where he develops nature-inspired computing paradigms to challenging problems in sensing artificial intelligence and control of autonomous robotic systems. He has more than 180 refereed publications including 10 books in robotics artificial intelligence machine learning planning sensing control and related disciplines. Hesham Fouad is the section head for the Intelligent Decision Support Section within the Information Technology Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Dr. Fouad has over 35 years of experience as a Computer Scientist working in both industry and academia. He began his career at IBM Advanced Technologies where he worked on the first commercially available expert system development and runtime environment. Expert System Environment (ESE) was developed through a collaborative effort between the AI team at Stanford University and IBM. Dr. Fouad worked with the Stanford team to integrate new capabilities into ESE such as Frame Based Reasoning. Dr. Fouad also worked with the Voice Recognition group led by Kai-Fu Lee at Carnegie Mellon university to transition their S&T into IBMs Via Voice product. Finally Dr. Fouad worked with the MIT media labs Project Athena group on a collaborative effort to integrate a Hypermedia capability into the OS/2 operating system. Dr. Fouad left IBM to pursue a Doctoral Degree in Computer Science at The George Washington University where he conducted his dissertation research on optimal real-time scheduling algorithms for Imprecise Computations using a fair scheduling strategy. This work was the basis of a startup company that Dr. Fouad founded and ran for 13 years. During that time Dr. Fouad developed and managed the production of a line of commercial software for synthetic spatial audio design and production. He also conducted research on and managed several ONR funded BAA and SBIR awards on adaptive training in virtual environments during that time. Dr. Fouad maintained his involvement with academia both as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University and as chair of a newly created undergraduate degree program in Computer Science with a focus on Game Development at the Art Institute of Washington. Since joining NRL Dr. Fouad has led numerous efforts with three transitions to-date. He has procured millions in funding from Navy Marines Army and OUSD sources. He has mentored SEAP students and has taken on a variety of roles within The Technical Cooperation Program.