Daily, numerous chat messages circulate among pilots, crew members, and controllers at the Air Mobility Command’s 618th Air Operations Center (AOC). These controllers manage an expansive fleet of aircraft, balancing various factors to decide which routes to take, the duration of refueling or loading supplies, and identifying personnel for missions. Their strategic planning enables the U.S. Air Force to promptly address national security demands across the globe.
“It requires substantial effort to deploy a missile defense system worldwide, for instance, and this coordination used to rely heavily on telephone calls and emails. Now, we are leveraging chat, creating opportunities for artificial intelligence to improve our workflows,” states Colonel Joseph Monaco, the strategy director at the 618th AOC, which is recognized as the largest air operations center within the Department of Defense.
The 618th AOC is collaborating with Lincoln Laboratory to create these artificial intelligence tools through an initiative known as Conversational AI Technology for Transition (CAITT).
During a visit to Lincoln Laboratory from the 618th AOC’s headquarters located at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, Colonel Monaco, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Heaton, and Captain Laura Quitiquit engaged with laboratory researchers to discuss CAITT. This initiative is part of a larger effort to implement AI technology as part of a significant Air Force modernization plan, called the Next Generation Information Technology for Mobility Readiness Enhancement (NITMRE).
The type of AI utilized for this initiative is natural language processing (NLP), enabling models to comprehend and process human language. “We are employing NLP to identify major trends in chat conversations, extract and reference specific details, and pinpoint and contextualize crucial decision-making moments,” explains Courtland VanDam, a researcher in Lincoln Laboratory’s AI Technology and Systems Group, which is spearheading the project. CAITT encompasses a suite of tools that harness NLP.
One of the most advanced tools, topic summarization, identifies trending subjects within chat messages and presents those topics in an easily digestible format, highlighting essential discussions and emergent issues. For instance, a trending topic could state, “Crew members lacking Congo visas, risk of delay.” This entry illustrates the number of chats related to the subject while summarizing in bullet points the main discussions, linking back to specific chat exchanges.
“Our missions are highly time-sensitive, necessitating a swift synthesis of a wealth of information. This feature can effectively direct our focus to where our efforts should be concentrated,” comments Monaco.
Another tool currently being developed is semantic search. This innovation enhances the chat service’s search functionality, which presently yields no results if chat messages don’t include every term in the query. With the new tool, users can pose inquiries in a natural language style, such as asking why a specific aircraft is experiencing delays, and receive intelligent insights. “It utilizes a neural networks-based search model that comprehends user intent behind the query and surpasses mere term matching,” VanDam explains.
Additional tools in the pipeline aim to automatically incorporate users into chat discussions relevant to their field of expertise, forecast the ground time required to unload particular cargo from aircraft, and summarize essential processes from regulatory documents to assist operators in crafting their mission plans.
The CAITT initiative emerged from the DAF–MIT AI Accelerator, a collaborative effort involving MIT, Lincoln Laboratory, and the Department of the Air Force (DAF) aimed at developing and deploying AI algorithms and systems to benefit both the DAF and society. “Through our engagement in the AI Accelerator via the NITMRE project, we discovered we could harness the unstructured chat data within the 618th AOC in innovative ways,” notes Heaton.
As laboratory researchers refine their prototypes for CAITT tools, they have begun transitioning these innovations to the 402nd Software Engineering Group, which serves as a software provider for the Department of Defense. This group will integrate the tools into the operational software environment utilized by the 618th AOC.