DATASCAPE

My Defence projects on Virtual Humans have ranged from more "routine" application such as virtual assistants for situational awareness and data analytics to "Virtual Barry" which looked to see how well the technology of the mid/late 2010s would let us create a virtual copy of a real human in a role such as staff officer - it did surprisingly well as well as developing a novel way to manage a conversation in a human-like way. One of my current projects is the ongoing development an automated synthetic wrap for social media and military reporting funded under the DASA "Populating the World of Training" programme.

Several of the virtual human projects have strayed more explicitly into the real of human-machine teaming (HMT). This has included AViD which looked to provide a bot within a 3D data visualisation environment to help users analyse data and maintain corporate knowledge between sessions and AiDA  which examined the whole concept of an intelligent (or even wise) ship as an entity to be talked to and engaged with. My latest project in this space (again DASA funded) was around looking at how co-operative boardgames (such as Pandemic) could be good test-beds for HMT research, and in this project case looking at the potential of shared mental models to inform human-machine teams.

Most of my Defence work on virtual environments has been around their use for training, education and data visualisation/situational awareness. Much of my early work in this space was in social virtual worlds such as Second Life and Daden were multiple prize-winners at the US Federal Virtual Worlds Challenge. As well as our work for the MOD we also did work for other government departments and for FEMA/DHS in the USA. My main interest now is in the use of browser-based virtual environments, for mobile and HMD VR/MR that obviate the need for any downloads, and platforms which enable user-generated environment design and build.

My wargaming activity within Defence covers both professional projects (where I have worked in both grey-zone and AI wargaming) and my PhD related work on urban wargaming which is being developed in conversation with MOD (and other) professionals and will hopefully involve MOD (and other) play-tests. There is also potential (and actual) overlap with my work on conversational AI, human-AI teaming and virtual environments.