Sandia National Laboratories is developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions.

The initial goal of the work was to create a “synthetic human” that could think like a person. Work on cognitive machines took off in 2002 with a contract from DARPA to develop a real-time machine that can infer an operator’s cognitive processes.

It could augment the cognitive capacities of an operator through “Discrepancy Detection”: the machine uses an operator’s cognitive model to monitor its own state and when there is evidence of a discrepancy between the actual state of the machine and the operator’s perceptions or behavior, a discrepancy may be signaled.

Early this year work began on Sandia’s Next Generation Intelligent Systems Grand Challenge project. “The goal…is to significantly improve the human capability to understand and solve national security problems, given the exponential growth of information and very complex environments,” says Larry Ellis, the principal investigator.

“We are integrating extraordinary perceptive techniques with cognitive systems to augment the capacity of analysts, engineers, war fighters, critical decision makers, scientists and others in crucial jobs to detect and interpret meaningful patterns based on large volumes of data derived from diverse sources.”

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories press release