Anna Forrester
Sandia National Laboratories has teamed with San Diego-based small business EyeTracking on a cooperative research and development agreement to build tools that improve the interaction between intelligence analysts and visual information.
Sandia said Thursday the partnership aims to develop technology that helps drive effectiveness and efficiency in analyzing images and extracting insights from large, diverse and dynamic data sets.
“Where this could end up going is ensuring that as we invest money on information and analysis environments for intelligence analysts who are facing this firehose of information, we don’t give them software that increases their cognitive and perceptual load or that they just can’t use,” said Laura McNamara, an applied anthropologist at Sandia.
The team will use technology such as EyeTracking’s FOVIO Eye Tracker to monitor the “fixation” of a viewer on any particular part of a computer screen and study the viewer’s corresponding decision-making.
According to Sandia, it hopes to develop predictive models that can help shape the understanding of intelligence analysts’ visual cognition in real-world task environments.
Lockheed Martin‘s Sandia Corp. subsidiary operates Sandia National Laboratories for the Energy Department.
