Spring 2001

ME/IE 8773-8774

Intelligent Decision Support: Present and Future Keys
to the Information Processing Bottleneck

by

Caroline Hayes, Ph.D.
Nelson Associate Professor
Industrial Engineering Division
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Wednesday, April 4, 2001
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Room 108 ME
Broadcast on UNITE Channel A
Coffee and cookies will be available in 152 ME following the seminar

The information age has brought huge advances in information gathering, storage and dissemination technologies, but technologies that help people manage and interpret this information have been much slower to develop. In this talk I will describe several intelligent decision support systems designed to help practitioners better perform complex, information rich tasks such as manufacturing planning, engineering design and military planning. I will focus on two military decision support systems, FOX and CoRaven, which have been developed by my research group and colleagues for the Army Research Laboratory. FOX uses a genetic algorithm to assist military planners, who must operate in a very uncertain and rapidly changing environment, to rapidly generate several alternative courses of action. CoRaven uses a Bayesian Belief Network to help military analysts to rapidly interpret large quantities of intelligence information from the battlefield, and to develop a better picture of what is currently happening (situation awareness). Under current practices, these tasks cannot always be performed rapidly or thoroughly enough. Consequently, battles and lives may be lost. Fox and CoRaven provide a "power assist" to these decision makers, and may radically change the way that these processes are performed in the future.

Caroline Hayes received her undergraduate degree (1983, Math/Computer Science), master (1987, Knowledge-Based Systems), and Ph.D. (1990, Robotics) from Carnegie Mellon University. She is the first graduate ever to have received a degree from a Robotics department. She was a member of the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois until 1998. Since then she has been the Nelson Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Her research focus is intelligent decision support systems for complex engineering tasks. She is currently serving as an associate editor for the journal IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 12:00 noon. A table is reserved at McCormick's Restaurant, Radisson Hotel Metrodome. Prof. Hayes will be able to attend.