Drew Dixon
A nearly $7.5 million grant is heading to the University of West Florida (UWF), allowing researchers at the Florida Panhandle campus to study and understand human judgment and decision-making.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research is committing a five-year grant to the school to head up the project that will also involve Artificial Intelligence (AI) modeling. It’s still subject to final negotiations and legal review, but the project is being dubbed “Adaptive Taxonomic Modeling of Variability in Judgement and Decision Making.”
K. Brent Venable, a UWF professor and Director of the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Doctoral Program, will oversee the project. The research is set to center on how people arrive at complex decisions under different conditions and how contributing modeling can enhance the accuracy of those decisions.
“This is a remarkable opportunity to advance our understanding of noise in human decision making and to explore how AI can be leveraged to model, support and ultimately improve those processes,” Venable said. “UWF is proud to lead a team of outstanding researchers dedicated to driving forward the science of decision making and delivering transformative impact for the Navy and beyond.”
Researchers at the Pensacola school will investigate how multiple factors, such as stress, experience, and other elements, influence human judgment. The experts will also develop predictive models that contribute to informed real-world decisions.
“This award underscores the University’s growing leadership in computational intelligence and predictive modeling,” said UWF Provost Jaromy Kuhl. “It not only supports world-class research at UWF, but also strengthens opportunities for collaboration with leading institutions across the country.”
One of the essential elements of the project will be the integration of cognitive science and AI. That combination will help develop systems that will replicate human reasoning and set up multiple scenarios involving decision-making. The byproduct of that development will be designing support tools that improve effectiveness in defense settings and additional operations.
