Every successful organization which has to operate effectively in complex situations and environments is heavily reliant on collaborative sense making activities that are well-adapted to supporting decision making. These activities, in turn, entail distributed systems that combine heterogeneous human and automated resources, often provisioned on-demand for the duration of a mission or project. Examples span a wide variety of domains, e.g.: assessing the instability and conflict in war-torn country like Afghanistan, analyzing public health issues to develop and evaluate alternative bird flu contagion scenarios, or predicting a new technology’s market potential and the viability of a new start-up. There are identifiable commonalities in the analysis process across even these very different domains. Each entails: 

1. Decomposition or elaboration of taskings;
2. Generating and scheduling multiple, inter-dependent subtasks and/or workflows;
3. Discovery or collection of relevant information;
4. Development of candidate hypotheses, scenarios, explanations or solutions;
5. Evaluation of products in light of evidence, often leading to iterative or recursive
    information discovery or collection activities;
6. Forming a conclusion, explanation, or plan; and,
7. Communicating this to others.

The analysis process introduces new needs, requirements and difficulties related to collaboration. Hence, collaborative organizations and technologies face several challenges in the field of information analysis. 

This Symposium on Collaborative Analysis and Reasoning Systems (CARS), to be held as part of the 2016 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2016), will focus on the collaboration issues applicable to intelligence analysis systems and tasks, with emphasis on these seven functions. As the tasks and sub-tasks are often inter-dependent and worked on by different and disparately located analysts and groups; how can information discovered, distilled, abstracted, transformed in one step be made available in forms that can potentially guide and influence the others steps? 

The symposium will address issues related to the intelligence analysis infrastructure and services design, implementation and operation. It intends to address new collaboration challenges and present new ideas and solutions to the issues raised by the collaborative analysis domain. Ideas of interest include: (1) tools to speed and de-bias cognitive processing at individual and group levels of analysis; (2) tools to support collaboration, particularly through sharing or interchange of task representations, and, (3) integrated architectures which smoothly transition users between individual and collaborative work, both synchronous and asynchronous.