William McCormick
Paul Cummings, vice president of Transformational Training Systems for Amentum, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz for his first Executive Spotlight interview regarding the transition that U.S. military branches are undergoing for its training systems to implement the latest emerging technologies as well as the a new “train as you fight” approach and future advancement of these systems as technology continues to evolve.
“The future of training is that future conflict, whether it is on the ground, in cyberspace, in the air, or for the hearts and minds, is not getting simpler, it’s getting more complex. Harnessing complexity using training systems, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other advanced technologies will be the key to dominating contested environments.”
You can read the full Executive Spotlight with Paul Cummings below:
ExecutiveBiz: In the boom of tech innovation that the federal sector is undergoing, what are the most significant challenges that our military branches and warfighters are facing in how we use our current training systems and some of the gaps in capabilities that we need to address?
Paul Cummings: “My background in training and simulation actually came to be from the research side, specifically studying human performance. A lot of what we do is thinking about the relationship between learning and technologies. Those technologies may be available in the classroom, but may also be on the job technologies such as interactive guides, artificial intelligence, and enhanced augmented visual technologies designed to support better learning.
Fundamentally everything we do to support an individual to an entire workforce is focused on how we can apply engaging learning strategies to enhance and retain information. Sometimes technologies such as web, mobile, classroom, virtual reality and augmented reality, and blended systems can be part of a larger workforce training strategy.
Other times, supporting critical ‘reps and sets’ are vital for areas such as warfighter dominance when keeping our soldiers well-trained. Our U.S. soldiers are in an intense battle for speed with our near peer threats as technology is continuously used in contested environments
Ultimately, we need to make sure that all of our customers, whether they be Amentum employees, our DoD, commercial, and government partners, are expertly trained. When we inject a new technology, we need to be careful to understand how it works from a user experience perspective.
Are we imparting actual instructional strategies that are relevant to what they’re trying to learn? Can we collect that information to demonstrate accurate human performance? Are they actually learning? That way we’re always clear and careful to ensure that decisions we’re making are around not just the technology, but the learning strategy that’s associated with the technology.
This is a really important time in the history of technology and how we apply it to train our workforce. In a time of COVID, we have been pushed into a generation of a virtual and distributed workforce. This has created a number of important problems to overcome – and we at Amentum are working hard to solve them. We use training methods to create personalized learning strategies, to collaborative and distributed training, and gamified learning to enhance and reinforce knowledge.
A big part of what we do at Amentum is not only do we think about training technologies, but also the use of data and performance metrics to better understand each learner, which in turn can evolve a new and more precise learning strategy for our customers. It is very rewarding to be working with an Amentum team of experts on the next generation of technology-based training systems to support our customers.”
ExecutiveBiz: Congrats on the recent OTA to develop a new live training system prototype for the U.S. Army! What else can you tell us about the importance of “sensor-based tech” in how we are revolutionizing live training systems and developing a new “train-as-you-fight” approach?
Paul Cummings: “What an exciting time to be part of this important evolution in soldier training modernization. The U.S. government has been looking for ways to usher in new force-on-force training systems for our soldiers. From the mid-1970s, laser-based technologies had dominated this domain, but they lacked several key aspects of realism and training effectiveness.
The goal for our team was to say there are more efficient and mature solutions. Rather than trying to recreate a better laser solution, can we imagine that soldier weapons can track and target much like our advanced autonomous drones and robotic systems? We could provide computer vision sensors directly to the weapon or your person.
I can take the entire weapon-as-a-sensor-platform system (WaaSP), put it in my rucksack, carry it with my weapon, train as a marksman for force-on-force training and then be able to take that same general information out into the field. That’s the exciting part of working on a full revolutionary system to support how lightweight and embedded training systems are just as much in your operational purview as they are in your training program.
One of the reasons that I really was so excited about the team was there is a lot of research that’s been going on at the U.S. Army research labs. The work there is to figure out how to take some of these technologies and embed them into introductory marksmanship programs. How it can get used for these larger force-on-force training exercises.
For a new technology, you want to start with, ‘okay, let’s build it, but we’ll build it to the standards of what the training in the Army looks like. After that, we’re going to test it.’ This is really one of the great parts as we’re working on the live training system program to ensure that training effectiveness is occurring. We can also help inform the future, larger learning strategies across individual marksmen all the way to these complex training exercises.”
ExecutiveBiz: With advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and more tech, what are your thoughts on the future of tech and training modernization to keep our warfighters and systems ahead of the curve as technology continues to leap forward so rapidly?
Paul Cummings: “What you’re asking is about an ‘investment strategy.’ We think about augmented reality and virtual reality. There’s going to be an evolution in the technology investment into understanding how to use it, as well as establishing a culture of what it means to be a next-generation operator of game technology and simulation technology.
However, we are at a place now where even though there will always be a lot of interesting and important research related to how to reach that level of training effectiveness using augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality systems, we also have a number of years behind us now. We’re getting much better, but this is also about why this is an important evolution of technology.
Virtual reality has come a long way. We’re seeing increased abilities and new technologies that are essentially decreasing in cost, which will create a lower barrier to entry. You have a larger ecosystem of developers, but we understand how to create that training. You have the modernization efforts that are coming from DOD, and then you have instructors and research scientists that are supporting how this process is working.
We’re at a much higher level of maturity than we were ten years ago. There’s really great work that’s coming out of not only the use of these systems but how do we collect information and provide accurate measurement of, ‘is this a good tool to use here.’ We want to apply a virtual reality system. We’d like to be able to do an augmented reality system so we need to build these matrix structures to help make those determinations to apply those technologies effectively.
Although I love education and learning, I’m actually trained as a computational social scientist (CSS). CSS is designed to look to mathematics, computation, and AI to better understand how people interact in complex environments. So if we think about CSS from a warfighter perspective, the human performance data we collect can help us understand not only the warfighter but how they interact in complex scenarios. We start very early on collecting that information to understand the operator’s pre-qualification. We follow that through their entire career path, so we can collect that information.
Within that process, we have a better understanding of what we want that individual to learn. We want them to learn given the strengths of their profile. We could refine our learning strategy. We could decide to provide other types of technologies to help support them. We could use that towards not only individuals but in groups towards more expeditious training and making sure that we can move them along quickly.
In addition, VR and AR provide some really interesting new ways to collect that data. The ability to understand position information, collect eye-tracking information but also to understand where people’s hands are and how they work within a virtual environment. That’s data that in many ways can be easier to collect than in the real world.
For instance, if I’m developing a medical simulation that takes place in a dangerous environment, I can collect biometric information. I can collect and see what they’re looking at in real-time. I can see how effective they are doing each individual task and what we can use. From that, we can create multiple scenarios and then see how effective they are across those scenarios using these immersive technology tools.”
ExecutiveBiz: What are your expectations as Amentum moves into the future and federal agencies address the challenges we’ve discussed and what are your expectations for the next year to five years on the development of these technologies?
Paul Cummings: “The future is really around automation. What’s going to happen as we develop our training systems is that our data is going to help make these systems a lot more precise. In other words, the computer vision information that we’re pulling from the weapon is going to create better training data sets. The data that we’re collecting from individuals is going to help us create more precise ways of calculating human performance. The data that we are using will also inform the way that operations are going to take place.
Imagine that as you’re training better soldiers you are also building a system that can automatically identify targets in the field. So you see, the soldier will train the targeting system, which in turn creates a more precise soldier-marksman. Ultimately, we are creating and using technology to create better and smarter soldiers that are themselves creating better and smarter technologies to help support those soldiers.
And as we create better-trained soldiers, we can use that same information to create smarter AI adversaries. I am personally very interested in creating more realistic AI that becomes our ‘enemies’ in these simulated environments, not unlike what you see in Ender’s Game where you’re continuing to refine and create a smarter artificial intelligence-enhanced soldier.
And why do we apply these new technologies and learning strategies? Quite simply, the future of training is that future conflict, whether it is on the ground, in cyberspace, in the air, or for the hearts and minds, is not getting simpler, it’s getting more complex. Harnessing complexity using training systems, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other advanced technologies will be the key to dominating contested environments.
And rest assured, Amentum is putting its full might towards solving the most pressing training challenges, and I am very proud of our team’s ability to usher in the next generation of highly skilled soldiers, workforce professionals, and life-long learners.”
