Focus Areas

Sandia's Cognitive Science and Applications group can be divided into five main focus areas, which when integrated together, create a dynamic whole. Each focus area narrows in on a specific piece of the cognitive science puzzle:

Understanding Human Decision Making
Producing multi-scale computational models at neuro/cognitive/social scales to help research areas such as decision-making, perception, learning, and memory, as well as create new sensors that will facilitate cognitive model validation and enable measurement of human cognitive states.

Improving Human Performance
Developing innovative technological approaches for improving human performance of individuals and teams. Technologies encompass real-time operational systems that utilize various sensors to monitor and adapt to the cognitive state of an operator and training technologies that feature automated performance assessment as a basis for targeting training interventions to the specific needs of each individual student. Additionally, game-based concepts are being explored as a basis for addressing training and as a component within operational systems.

Human-Centric Data Collection and Analysis
Innovative data-centric technical solutions for driving research and development of human-in-the-loop systems. Our multidisciplinary team provides data collection techniques for people, software, and hardware in both laboratory and real-world environments, which we combine with our wide array of data analysis techniques through machine learning, text analysis, data fusion, and statistics. We put data to work to help people.

Advanced Software Development
Developing innovative software solutions that turn research concepts into reality by utilizing cost-effective software engineering approaches at the level appropriate for the end-product. We have developed a suite of reusable software components to provide advanced cognitive system technologies to meet a wide variety of application and research needs.

Surety-based Verification and Validation, Ethics, Legal, and Social Issues
Ensures that cognitive systems are safe, secure, and reliable through the application of surety science, verification and validation (V&V) processes, and management of ethics, legal, and social issues (ELSI).

Integration of Cognitive Science and Applications' Focus Areas

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