Remote sensing technology is playing an increasingly central role in military operations. The interpretation of satellite and aircraft photography has great utility in allowing forces to assess a situation from a secure, stealthy distance. However, performing effective interpretations of remote sensing photography is a complex science. Knowledge of a complex, highly-visual domain, such as that of remote sensing, cannot be learned from manuals. For an analyst to become proficient requires a large investment of training time from an expert.

Our paper describes an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) being built for NASA. The goal of this software is to provide the benefits of a one-on-one remote sensing instructor to teach Earth Science principles. The ITS integrates directly with the NASA Image2000 image processing software, the actual end environment in which researchers perform real-life tasks. Together, NASA Image2000 and the ITS provide students with a dynamic, hands-on educational experience that is cost-effective. It monitors and assesses the student's actions, provides immediate feedback as well as contextual guidance and challenges. A separate authoring tool allows new tutorials for the ITS to be developed by non-programmers. Thus, instructors can readily produce interactive, adaptive tutorials for an area of remote sensing interest. With regard to military application, tutorials can be constructed to teach the wide array of interpretation tasks: image enhancement, object classification, target discrimination, damage assessment, weather prediction, etc. The tutorials can focus on a specific geographical location.

This paper outlines our research of a remote sensing ITS system, its general framework, the artificial intelligence technologies it employs to model the knowledge of the student and the expert, and its application to the Earth Science domain.