 The battlefield of the future will be complex, with mountains of data moving rapidly between commanders, operation centers and the joint warfighter. With this multifaceted environment, Army researchers and their partners are searching for solutions. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory formed an alliance in 2010 with universities and industry to enable revolutionary advances in soldier systems technology by merging neuroscience, psychology, engineering and human factors to deliver those solutions. The more we know about how individual soldiers are doing in any given situation, context whether it's mission or training, the more we can develop technologies or solutions that will improve performance. Turian said the researchers are working on new technologies that will enable intelligent agents that take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In theory, these intelligent agents will have computational power much greater than that of humans. The alliance, which will continue for two more years, recently held a biennial research management board where laboratory leadership and their partners looked at progress so far and envisioned the path ahead. This is about taking all that we've learned in the field of neuroscience and neuro-technology and taking that out of the laboratory and putting it in real-world contexts, army-relevant contexts and situations. During the review, attendees watched demonstrations of research successives such as a study to gauge how effective communications can be in a life-and-death situation. Outfitted with sensors looking at the body and in particular the brain, a driver and passenger drove up and down a busy expressway while the passenger communicated information. What we're interested in doing is understanding whether we can look at the synchrony between the physiology, so the brain response or the heart rate response, between the driver and passenger and use that synchrony to predict whether the driver is going to remember the information that the passenger is telling them after the drive is over. The experiment also used a unique visualization tool developed at the laboratory known as Clive, or customizable lighting interface for the visualization of EEGs, think brainwaves. The tool shows how well two brains are synced. As Clive was showing this synchronization across the brain, we know as neuroscientists that certain brain regions are implicated in particular tasks. With 244 individual LED lights, Clive can portray many colors and intensities. It's often very difficult for us to explain or visualize what's going on inside people's brains to other people who are non-scientists. And so this was just sort of a creative way that we came up with to show people what's actually going on inside someone's head when they're doing different types of activities. In another demonstration, a participant with brainwave sensors participated in a computer simulation while researchers introduced external distractions and measured how her brain reacted. And we can provide feedback that will mitigate the stress that the operator is feeling and help them improve their overall performance. As a basic science research program, the scientist said it is challenging to know exactly how their research will translate into technology for the future army. This is a very challenging technology field because of the complexity of the brain, inherent complexity of the brain makes this research very challenging in addition to the complexity of measuring the brain and corresponding physiological signals in the real environment in a real world operational context. The Alliance, officially known as the Cognition and Neuro-Organomics Collaborative Technology Alliance, has seven principal organizations as consortium members and a number of institutions as sub-awardees. They are primarily academic institutions like the University of Florida, the University of California San Diego, Columbia University, and the University of Texas, San Antonio, as well as international partners and a number of smaller programs with other universities and small businesses. Collaboration, I think, is essential because our academic partners have a broad understanding of the problem space, the scientific problem space. They have insights and resources and they make excellent partners when doing executing basic science research and we provide a lot of, in addition to that type of expertise, an understanding of the army problem space, the things that the critical gaps that need to be addressed in our research. So together, we can develop combined project plans and programs, research programs that push the science forward in a way that's meaningful for technology transition that will be useful in future soldier systems.