Addressing the Homeland Security Problem: A Collaborative Decision-Making Framework

A majority of critical decisions requires collaborative efforts among analysts to build situation awareness. Teams of decision makers frequently have to react to incoming facts and developing events in a timely fashion such that the consequences of the decisions made largely have a positive impact on a developing situation. This problem is further exacerbated due to the multitude of agencies involved in the decision-making process. Thus, the decision-making processes faced by the intelligence agencies are characterized by group deliberations that are highly ill structured and yield limited analytical tractability. In this context, a collaborative approach to providing cognitive support to decision makers using a connectionist modeling approach is proposed. The connectionist modeling of such decision scenarios offers several unique and significant advantages in developing systems to support collaborative discussions. Several inference rules for augmenting the argument network and to capture implicit notions in arguments are proposed. We further explore the effects of incorporating notions of information source reliability within arguments and the effects thereof.