Australia will deploy next year a new fleet of advanced surveillance aircrafts. The Wedgetails planes are marrying Boeing 737-700 technology with battlespace analytics programs developed by the Australian's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). According to Computerworld Australia, these planes are data center with wings. CSIRO has developed new software that automates the interpretation of combat and surveillance situations. This software platform, also known as the Cognizant Control Room, "provides intelligent ways of delivering information to operators that minimize the risk of information overload." Read more...
Before going further, here are two photographs of this flying data center.
This photograph comes from this news release from Boeing announcing the arrival of the Wedgetail aircraft in Australia on March 15, 2005 (Credit: Boeing). You'll find a larger version of this picture there.
This second picture comes from CSIRO where you'll find a much larger version of this image on this page (3,000 x 2,400 pixels, 4.01 MB).
Now, let's look at some short excerpts from the Computerworld Australia article mentioned above.
According to a CSIRO spokesman, a team of 20 scientists and engineers developed the new technology which automates the interpretation of combat and surveillance situations, and provides intelligent ways of delivering information to operators that minimize the risk of information overload.
Known as the Cognizant Control Room (CCR), the platform's software deals specifically with automated "situation assessment" of the "entire air picture" - including enemy force structure and its tactical intent.
CCR also contains feature to help operators think. Dubbed "awareness monitoring", the speech and actions of operators are analyzed and compared to the system's interpretation of events, with feedback provided.
On this page dedicated to Intelligent Interactive Technologies, CSIRO gives some more details.
The Task-Driven Interaction Module developed jointly with other CSIRO research groups, is composed of three components:
- The Operator Graphical User Interface, which allows the operator to interact with the system
- The Task-Recognition Parser, which analyses the operator’s activity to be able to both determine the current task in progress and predict the next one
- The Virtual Document Planner (VDP), which delivers multimedia information tailored to the operators’ tasks
For more information, here are two other links about the Wedgetail project, this one at Boeing and this other one at Wikipedia.
Sources: Dahna McConnachie, Computerworld Australia, August 19, 2005; and various web sites
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7:49:30 PM
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