  A consensus report produced for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) by
the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics documented a
prevalent and increasing desire to support human-Artificial Intelligence (AI)
teaming across military service branches. Sonalysts has begun an internal
initiative to explore the training of Human-AI teams. The first step in this
effort is to develop a Synthetic Task Environment (STE) that is capable of
facilitating research on Human-AI teams. Our goal is to create a STE that
offers a task environment that could support the breadth of research that
stakeholders plan to perform within this domain. As a result, we wanted to
sample the priorities of the relevant research community broadly, and the
effort documented in this report is our initial attempt to do so. We created a
survey that featured two types of questions. The first asked respondents to
report their agreement with STE features that we anticipated might be
important. The second represented open-ended questions that asked respondents
to specify their priorities within several dimensions of the anticipated STE.
The research team invited nineteen researchers from academic and Government
labs to participate, and 11 were able to complete the survey. The team analyzed
their responses to identify themes that emerged and topics that would benefit
from further analysis. The most significant finding of the survey was that a
number of researchers felt that various open-source STEs that would meet our
needs already exist. Researchers also emphasized the need for automated
transcription and coding tools to ease the burden of assessing inter-team
communications; the importance of robust data capture and export capabilities;
and the desirability of extensive flexibility across many aspects of the tool.
