
The goal of this project is to
improve the quality of decisions under uncertainty. Because very few decisions
by the intelligence community are ever made under complete certainty, the
quality of the complex decisions analysts make depends critically on their
ability to incorporate significant, task-relevant uncertainties. The
abstractness, complexity, and volume of real-world information can overwhelm
analysts. Consequently, various tools for visualizing intelligence information
have been developed that significantly improve the analysis of complex
intelligence. Though examination of uncertainty is critical, it is most
important when judgment is difficult or contentious, when adequate multi-source
perspectives do not back up data, or when information is subject to potential
deception. Despite this, current visualization methods and tools do not help
the analyst consider or take successful advantage of explicit or tacit
knowledge about information uncertainty. To overcome this, we are developing
novel methods for depicting the degree of uncertainty and its influence and
for supporting the manipulation of these factors by the analyst in order to
strengthen analytical reasoning.