2020 Aptima Annual Achievement Awards Recognize Best in Employee Achievements

Aptima, Inc., the leader in optimizing training and performance in the age of human-AI teams, announced today its Annual Achievement Awards. The Awards are meant to convey the company’s appreciation to individuals, teams, and groups of employees that perform above and beyond reasonable job expectations, contribute promising innovative ideas, or demonstrate exceptional leadership qualities. Nominations can be submitted by any Aptima employee and winners are selected by employee committees that change from year to year.

Citizen of the Year

New for 2020, the Citizen of the Year Award recognizes that employee who goes the extra mile in making Aptima a great place to work. This type of person may not be in any official position of power, but takes it upon themselves to make the workplace more enjoyable and humane.

• Sylvain Bruni
  Deputy Director, Performance Augmentation Systems Division
  “He goes out of his way to make Aptima a place with great policies and guidance across roles, tasks, and systems.”

Mentor of the Year

Ryan Mullins, Deputy Division Director, Intelligent Analytic Technologies Division

This Award recognizes Aptima employees who pro-actively develop and are genuinely committed to employees’ growth, development, and cultural integration into the organization.

• “Ryan makes it a priority to be a leader and mentor to not only those he is formally charged with mentoring, but to all new hires and junior staff in our division.”

Best Paper

The Best Paper Award recognizes excellence in preparing written products that disseminate Aptima’s work to a broader audience beyond employees and the company’s immediate customers. This year’s Award went to two papers.

• Performance Measurement Applications and Associated Data Requirements for LVC Training
  Jeffrey Beaubien, Michael Tolland, and Jared Freeman
  • Presented at vIITSEC 2020, highlights the various uses of aggregate learner data. At Aptima, we often say that measurement is important. But we don’t often describe why it is important. This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature by identifying the critical data elements that are required to run certain types of analyses. It also maps those data elements back to data standards such as DIS, HLA, HPML, and xAPI so that the audience can implement these ideas in their own organizations.
• Contextualizing inclusion: Developing a framework and measure for a military context
  Tara A. (Rench) Brown, Krista L. Ratwani, Melinda J. Key-Roberts, Mathias J. Simmons, Tatianan J. Toumbeva, and Lisa H. Nishii
  • This paper was accepted by Military Psychology this year. The three Aptima authors partnered with our ARI Fort Leavenworth customers (Mathias, Melinda) and academic partner (Dr. Nishii), to write up the work we conducted under the Climate for Inclusion contract with ARI over the last several years. This contract, which is still on-going, focuses on developing a military-specific conceptualization, measure, and training tool for a climate of inclusion to be used within the context of small units (in this case, platoons). The paper sets a critical foundation for this work, showcasing the extensive, multi-method approach by which the team established the conceptual framework and measure for a climate for inclusion. Following this paper, Aptima has continued to work with ARI to develop a full training tool for platoon leadership based on this framework and measure, which is being fully evaluated during the current phase of the project. By publishing this paper early in this process, we have established ourselves as experts in this field and have set ourselves up for future publications (currently underway). Our ARI customers were more than delighted to have a peer-reviewed publication come out of this work, further establishing our excellent relationship with them.

Best Teamwork

Aptima’s Best Teamwork Award recognizes cooperative groups that achieve Company goals or objectives of material value and quality by 1) pooling their complementary skills and knowledge, 2) holding each other personally responsible for doing their individual fair share of work, and 3) accepting mutual accountability for the ultimate outcome of their efforts. This year’s award went to two teams:

• Aptima’s PeopleOps Department (formerly known as Human Resources)
  Stephanie Amancio-Scott, Rosa Moreno, and Mercy Jubin
• 5D-IVIS: 5D Intelligent Visualization
  Ryan Mullins, Chad Weiss, Spencer Lynch, and Mary Freiman

Outstanding Initiative

Recognizing Aptima employees who pro-actively develop and successfully implement a new idea, this year’s Outstanding Initiative Award went to two teams.

• Comprehensive Social Media Strategy
  Debra McNeely and Connor Simmons
• AptiCares Employee Support Group
  Charlotte Shabarekh, Bob McCormack, and Kara Orvis

Best Technical Achievement

This Award is intended to acknowledge outstanding performance within the structure of ongoing projects in the area of research and development.

• CHEWBACCA: Collaborative Heuristic-based Engineering Workbench with a Behavior-Aware Classifier for Cognitive Assistance
  Mary Freiman, Spencer Lynch, Jianna Logue, Noah DePriest, Harper Willis, Chad Weiss, Patrick Cummings, Danny Ward, Kristy Kay, Kara Orvis, Sylvain Bruni

Innovative Patent Application

The Innovative Patent Application Award recognizes excellence in the area of research and development by an employee or a group of employees by acknowledging outstanding innovative inventions developed at Aptima.

• ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONVERSATIONAL AGENT SYSTEMS AND METHODS OF USE also known as Aptima’s first AI employee, Charlie AI
• Patrick Cummings, Ryan Mullins, Manuel Moquete, and Nathan Schurr