Facilitating Human Collaboration with Agents

Ad hoc cross-agency teams are often needed to deal with actual, imminent, or potential crises that involve multiple geographic or political jurisdictions or require coordinated expertise from organizations with different responsibilities. Many of these teams are wholly or partially virtual. We have implemented an initial set of personal and organizational agents, agent-based work flows, and Web services that facilitates the establishment of collaborating teams of humans who work for different organizations and whose primary mode of interaction is virtual. The agents augment existing email and office automation applications in an organization. Preliminary results show the potential for a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the time needed to form a team. The system is being enhanced to manage on-going collaborations of team members and workgroups.