Second International Symposium on Resilience Engineering, Cannes France, Nov. 9-10, 2006; see conference overview link
Submit 1-2 page abstracts by July 7 to Erik.Hollnagel@cindy.ensmp.fr
The Law of Stretched Systems in Action: Exploiting Robots
Podcast avialable at: HRI06 link
Plenary address at the Human-Robot Interaction Conference HRI’06, Salt Lake City, UT, March 2-4, 2006 examined new findings on how to coordinate activities over wider ranges given robots and how to expand our perception and action over larger spans through remote devices.
Podcast directions: get itunes, click subscribe at link to download to itunes, select the cover art icon at the lower left of the itunes screen to see thumbnails of the visuals, click on each to get full size (bug in apple's software; only thumbnails update automatically), none of the videos play given current software, click on the "widget" which is at the top of the itunes screen (just to the left of the search window and just to the right of the title/time left window) to get chapters (like song tracks) and jump around.
Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods and Nancy Leveson (editors)
Explores groundbreaking new development in safety and risk management, where 'success' is based on the ability of organizations, groups and individuals to anticipate the changing shape of risk before failures and harm occur. Featuring contributions from many of the worlds leading figures in the fields of human factors and safety, Resilience Engineering provides provocative insights into system safety.
James Reason:
'This is the most thought-provoking collection of papers I've read in a very long time. They are written by the best in the field at the top of their form. Resilience is a notion whose time has come. We cannot realistically expect to eliminate adverse events and still stay in business. But we can strive to achieve greater robustness towards our operational hazards. This book tells us how to do it and why it's necessary.'
Teaching Cognitive Engineering?
A new resource is:
Joint Cognitive Systems: Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering
Abstract from JCS: Patterns...
New technologies are fascinating, we thought, because more powerful automation would overcome human limitations and make our systems ‘faster, better, cheaper’ with simple easy tasks for people. Be prepared to be surprised—what you thought you knew about new technology and more powerful automation is not what happens. Research in Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) looks at the intersection of people, technology and work. What it has found is not stories of simplification through more automation, rather it has found stories of complexity and adaptation. When work changed through new technology, the real result was practitioners now had to cope with new complexities and tighter constraints. They adapted their strategies and the artifacts to workaround difficulties and accomplish their goals as responsible agents. The surprise was that new powers had transformed work creating new roles, new decisions and new vulnerabilities. Ironically, more autonomous machines have created the requirement for more sophisticated forms of coordination across people and across people and machines to adapt to new demands and pressures.
This book synthesizes these Patterns though stories about coordination and mis-coordination, resilience and brittleness, affordance and clumsiness in a variety of settings, from a hospital intensive care unit, to a nuclear power control room, to a space shuttle control center. The stories reveal demands that make work difficult, how people at work adapt but get trapped by complexity, how people at a distance from work oversimplify the complexities and squeeze practitioners. The book tells the story of how CSE observes at intersection of people, technology and work, how CSE abstracts patterns behind the surface details and wide variations, and how CSE discovers promising new directions to help people cope with complexities. The stories of CSE show one key to well-adapted work is the ability to avoid getting stuck and to be ready to revise—being prepared to be surprised.
How do people work around complexity and exploit new capabilities in work? How do systems of people and artifacts adapt to the demands of work? What are the surprising reverberations of technology change? Cognitive Systems Engineering arose about 25 years ago to meet these challenges. This book provides the authoritative guide to the origins and basic concepts from 2 of the pioneers in the field.
Joint Cognitive Systems: Foundations of Cognitive Systems Engineering
Erik Hollnagel & David D. Woods
Contents
The Driving Forces
The Evolution Of Work
The Basics Of A Science
The Threads Of CSE
Coping With Complexity
Use Of Artifacts
Joint Cognitive Systems
Control And Cognition
CSE And Its Applications
Taylor & Francis, February 2005, 200 pp.
ISBN: 0-8493-2821-7, $99.95 / £60.99
Co-organizer, Workshop on Intelligent Decision Support in Process Environments, August 31—September 2, 2005, Siena, Italy (Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the NATO ASI on Intelligent Decision Support in Process Environments September 16-27, 1985, San Miniato, Italy).
The Study Committee on “Sufficient Evidence? Building Certifiably Dependable Systems” has published the results of a Workshop on Software Certification and Dependability held on April 19-20, 2004.
The study committee is organized by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academy of Science to assess current practices for developing and evaluating mission-critical software and to develop a research agenda for dependable software system development and certification.
For the workshop results see NAS/CSTB current projects
Organized with Erik Hollnagel (University of Linkoping Sweden) and Nancy Leveson (MIT, USA) the International Symposium on Resilience Engineering, October 20-25, 2004, Soderoping Sweden with about 20 participants from over 10 countries.
Symposium Objective
"Research on human reliability, human performance, and organisational aspects of risk and safety have led to the emerging area of Resilience Engineering as an alternative to error tabulations and probabilistic risk management. Resilience Engineering has been proposed as the new field, which enhances organisations’ ability to monitor/revise risk models and to target safety investments proactively despite ongoing production and economic pressures.
The objective of this symposium is to provide an opportunity for experts from around the world to meet and debate the presence and future of Resilience Engineering. Whereas many workshops are characterised by long presentations interrupted by short discussions, this symposium will consist of long discussions interrupted by short presentations."
A brief account of Resilience Engineering: Resilience Engineering Brief pdf
An edited book is being prepared based on the Symposium results.
Contributor to "Organization at the Limit: NASA and the Columbia Disaster" (Blackwell) which provides lessons for all organziations. Download the chapter -- Creating Foresight: Lessons for Enhancing Resilience from Columbia:
creating foresight pdf
Received an IBM Faculty Award for his work on Human Centered Automation as part of their initiatives on "Autonomic Computing" to connect the increases in adaptive computing infrastructure to human supervision.
Co-editor of a special issue of IEEE SMC on Using Field Studies to Understand Technical Work in Healthcare. The studies will appear in IEEE SMC Part A in November 2004 edited by Chris Nemeth, Richard Cook and David Woods.
The introduction to the papers is intro to special issue pdf
Invited member, Research & Development Agenda for Visual Analytics Workshops, National Visualization and Analytics Center, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory & Department of Homeland Security.
Department of Education grant for a 3 year undergraduate student exchange program with Brazilian universities on Cognitive Engineering and Safety in Petroleum Industry.
5 ISE UGs are spending 6 months in Brazil working with local university and oil company as part of capstone project (started July 2004). Four Brazilian engineering students will arrive at OSU in January 2005.
See url http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/brazil for pictures of the students, rio, and their trip to an oil platform.
As hospitals across the United States develop policies to prevent worker fatigue and ensure patient safety, a study at Ohio State University has identified key strategies that might make the job easier. Culled from high-risk environments as diverse as a railroad dispatch center and the NASA Johnson Space Center, the strategies address the most critical time during any workday -- the shift change -- when incoming and outgoing workers have to exchange information and hand-off important duties. handoffs in health care pdf
Press items include Business First pdf press release pdf
Invited talk Conflicts between Learning and Accountability in Patient Safety.
Presented at the 10th Annual Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy. "Starting Over?: Redesigning the Medical Malpractice System." DePaul Law School, Chicago IL, April 15-16, 2004.
Examines how blame-based systems of accountability block information flow and learning, exacerbate double binds and goal conflicts, and degrade cooperation. beyond blame pdf