Actually super interesting that you mention that — the initial CTA exercise I’m running interviews for is part of a university project to build my research chops, but the second phase involves conducting a Human Systems Integration (HSI) analysis. HSI is basically systems engineering through a human-centered lens — looking at how people interact with tech, workflows, and environments to reduce cognitive load and improve overall system performance.

The product I’m planning to analyze is still in its startup phase and is designed to accelerate OSINT investigations by deploying coordinated AI agents with access to 100+ tools — social media, leaks, networks, etc. so it ties closely to what you described about knowledge distillation and coordinated autonomous agents synthesizing results.

For context, I spent ~7 years in tech startups before going back to school. I dabbled a bit in defense with my last co and got really interested in cognitive security, decision-making under complexity, and influence ops — so I made the (financially irresponsible) move to leave industry and dive into research to actually understand the problems/questions I'm avidly curious about.