Day by day, lots of of chat messages flow between pilots, crew, and controllers of the Air Mobility Command’s 618th Air Operations Center (AOC). These controllers direct a thousand-wide fleet of aircraft, juggling variables to find out which routes to fly, how much time fueling or loading supplies will take, or who can fly those missions. Their mission planning allows the U.S. Air Force to quickly reply to national security needs across the globe.
“It takes lots of work to get a missile defense system the world over, for instance, and this coordination was once done through phone and email. Now, we’re using chat, which creates opportunities for artificial intelligence to boost our workflows,” says Colonel Joseph Monaco, the director of strategy on the 618th AOC, which is the Department of Defense’s largest air operations center.
The 618th AOC is sponsoring Lincoln Laboratory to develop these artificial intelligence tools, through a project called Conversational AI Technology for Transition (CAITT).
During a visit to Lincoln Laboratory from the 618th AOC’s headquarters at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, Colonel Monaco, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Heaton, and Captain Laura Quitiquit met with laboratory researchers to debate CAITT. CAITT is a component of a broader effort to transition AI technology into a significant Air Force modernization initiative, called the Next Generation Information Technology for Mobility Readiness Enhancement (NITMRE).
The variety of AI getting used on this project is natural language processing (NLP), which allows models to read and process human language. “We’re utilizing NLP to map major trends in chat conversations, retrieve and cite specific information, and discover and contextualize critical decision points,” says Courtland VanDam, a researcher in Lincoln Laboratory’s AI Technology and Systems Group, which is leading the project. CAITT encompasses a collection of tools leveraging NLP.
Some of the mature tools, topic summarization, extracts trending topics from chat messages and formats those topics in a user-friendly display highlighting critical conversations and emerging issues. For instance, a trending topic might read, “Crew members missing Congo visas, potential for delay.” The entry shows the variety of chats related to the subject and summarizes in bullet points the foremost points of conversations, linking back to specific chat exchanges.
“Our missions are very time-dependent, so we have now to synthesize lots of information quickly. This feature can really cue us as to where our efforts must be focused,” says Monaco.
One other tool in production is semantic search. This tool improves upon the chat service’s search engine, which currently returns empty results if chat messages don’t contain every word within the query. Using the brand new tool, users can ask questions in a natural language format, resembling why a particular aircraft is delayed, and receive intelligent results. “It incorporates a search model based on neural networks that may understand the user intent of the query and transcend term matching,” says VanDam.
Other tools under development aim to routinely add users to talk conversations deemed relevant to their expertise, predict the quantity of ground time needed to unload specific forms of cargo from aircraft, and summarize key processes from regulatory documents as a guide to operators as they develop mission plans.
The CAITT project grew out of the DAF–MIT AI Accelerator, a three-pronged effort between MIT, Lincoln Laboratory, and the Department of the Air Force (DAF) to develop and transition AI algorithms and systems to advance each the DAF and society. “Through our involvement within the AI Accelerator via the NITMRE project, we realized we could do something modern with all the unstructured chat information within the 618th AOC,” says Heaton.
As laboratory researchers advance their prototypes of CAITT tools, they’ve begun to transition them to the 402nd Software Engineering Group, a software provider for the Department of Defense. That group will implement the tools into the operational software environment in use by the 618th AOC.
