About Us

Mark Adkins, PhD

Mark is a master group facilitator who has facilitated hundreds of significant events for large groups of senior executives and general officers with outstanding results. In 1986, Mark began teaching and conducting research in the fields of Communication and Information Systems. Dr. Adkins’ most recent work has been: 1) leading a team in the U.S. Pacific Command using the Technology Transition Model to integrate a collaborative system in an operation center; 2) directing an effort to develop and integrate a collaborative environment for a government and defense contractor team; 3) working to develop and deploy information systems to detect deception on our nations borders; and 4) delivering workshops on Network Centric Warfare to Ministry of Defence and Department of Defense members across the globe using a collaborative wargame developed to train participants by analyzing their own behavior. Past projects include: 1) the facilitation and integration of technology into a distributed strategic planning process for 10,000 U.S. Air Force personnel; 2) developing technology to augment the facilitation of group writing and process modeling for the U.S. Department of Defense; and 3) working with the U.S. Navy on determining how joint operations, combining Navy, Army, Marine and Air Force units, will be organized, controlled and coordinated using collaborative technologies. Dr. Adkins has spent thousands of hours at sea on different ships around the globe as a researcher. He worked with the U.S. Navy Commander Third Fleet to integrate collaboration concepts and technology by developing a virtual environment between the Civil Military Operations Center and the Joint Medical Center on the USS CORONADO. Dr. Adkins worked with U.S. Pacific Fleet and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center to develop and deploy prototype software, CommandNet, to improve situation awareness in, across, and outside an Expeditionary Strike Group. Recently, Dr. Adkins and Dr. Kruse concluded work with the U.S. Secretary of Defense's Office of Force Transformation on a case study analyzing Network Centric Warfare in the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet during Operation Enduring Freedom. Mark earned a PhD from the University of Arizona and a Master's degree from the University of Hartford.

John Kruse, PhD

John was previously the Director of Systems Development at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Management of Information. His primary field of interest is the development of collaborative systems for decision making. In pursuit of this, he has worked extensively in the field of military decision support and network-centric operations. Additionally, Dr. Kruse has been working to develop prototype systems for automated intent and deception detection for the last four years. He has worked extensively with a wide range of educational, governmental and military groups to help develop group processes and software that supports collaborative work. Dr. Kruse has facilitated group meetings with a wide range of organizations including: United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, Office of the Special Trustee – U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Navy Third Fleet, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. He is currently working to develop learning and language processing software for deception detection. He has previously worked to develop software for event logging and group writing. He has spent over seventeen years in the U.S. Army reserves as an air traffic controller and field artillery officer. Dr. Kruse received his BS and MBA from the University of Wyoming and a PhD from the University of Arizona.

Doug Twitchell, PhD

Douglas Twitchell is an associate with AK Collaborations and assistant professor of Information Systems in the School of Information Technology at Illinois State University. Dr. Twitchell was part of a five-year effort sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to perform basic research in the area of deception and its detection in the context of information systems. As part of this research Dr. Twitchell created StrikeCom, a multiplayer online game for researching and teaching group and interpersonal interactions such as leadership and deception. StrikeCom has been used throughout the world as part of the Network-Centric Operations short course curriculum. In addition to currently teaching information assurance and security courses, Dr. Twitchell is researching social engineering and redeveloping StrikeCom for use in teaching information assurance and security as well as Network Centric Operations.