Re-Orienting Costs
(D. Tuzar & D. Woods)
This study shows how to use re-orienting cost as a measure of the quality of human-computer interaction for multi-task situations. The study includes designs to reduce re-orienting cost for car in-cab interfaces
[DEMONSTRATION, MEDIA-PAPER, DESIGN, METRIC, THESIS]
re-orienting cost mediapaper 10MB pdf
Model of Perspective-Taking and the Perspective Controller design
(A. Roesler, now at University of Washington)
A model of perspective-taking as multiple sensors and mobile robotic platforms provide remote observers with new ways to connect to distant situations. The model provides principles for coordination of multiple views from sensors/platforms monitoring remote locations. The model is illustrated by a 3-dimensional view control interface design.
[DEMONSTRATION, MEDIA-PAPER, DESIGN, MODEL, THESIS]
coordinating perspectives link
Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering
(D. Woods)
New book on results from CSE work.
[BOOK]
new book link
Coordinating Shared Perspectives
(M. Voshell & A. H. J. Oomes)
A new interface concept was developed and implemented to coordinate perspectives between multiple parties using a remote robotic system. A prototype was tested in a robotic search and rescue competition, and won. The system, built using a new framework for rapidly leveraging new navigation interfaces and remote sensor channels, allows us to take concepts quickly from simulation and implement on our robotic platform.
[DEMONSTRATION, REPORT, WON ROBOT COMPETITION]
HRI link
HRI site
Metric for Evaluating HRI Performance
(M. Voshel & F. Phillips)
Path analysis using fractal geometry provides a new metric for evaluating robot or human-robot team exploration. Simple measurements such as path length and completion times are particularly unsuitable for evaluating human-robot navigation performance in a complex environment with multiple tasks and competing goals. This class of space and time invariant metrics allow us to better analyze human robot exploration, interpret valuable behavioral information for analysis of movement efficiency, path tortuosity, and overall space utilization in relation to handler goals and overall environment characteristics. Not only is this metric valuable for post hoc analysis, but it also serves as a powerful cue to observability when integrated into robot operator displays.
[DEMONSTRATION, REPORT]
HRI site
Heads-Up in a Heads-Down World
(D. Tuzar & D. Woods)
Based on results on re-orienting cost, the model integrates factors that influence how attention shifts in multi-signal, multi-task situations.
[DEMONSTRATION, MODEL]
Human-Smart Camera Interaction in Visual Surveillance
(A. Morison, J. Davis)
This work is a new approach to human-camera interaction in visual surveillance by automatically learning scene awareness for a PTZ camera using low level event information (i.e. pedestrian motion). The learned scene awareness provides the camera a goal for moving or scanning around a scene (i.e. scan path) while human-camera coordination is accomplished through a single visualization which provides past, present, and future camera scan path information.
[DEMONSTRATION]
The Effects of Real-time Imaging Technology on Data Gathering and Analysis in Emergency Management (J. McGuirl)
A simulation-based study of Emergency Management personnel and Incident Commanders using a UAV video feed to assist in managing the response to an accident at a petro-chemical facility. FIndings address how commander decision-making and control strategies were affected by direct visual access to the operations area.
[STUDY, THESIS]
Layered CheckZone
(W. Elm, J. Tittle, D. Tinapple, D. Woods)
The Layered CheckZone concept applies CSE design principles to the problem of integrating multiple sensors and intelligent systems with a team of soldiers performing a common but important MOUT function: checkpoint operation. The Layered CheckZone provides a platform for understanding the challenges and exploring potential CSE solutions that arise when multi-sensor, multi-agent systems are teamed with soldiers conducting MOUT.
[DEMONSTRATION]
Study of MI Analysis Processes
(S. Trent, J. Grossman, E. Patterson, M. Voshell et al.)
A two-week study of military intelligence analysis in a counter-insurgency training exercise at the Army intel schoolhouse. Both an exercise in analysis as well as a study of analysis. Findings address information synthesis, cross-checks, connecting analysis to recommendations and inferring intent.
[STUDY]
Design Seeds for Information Analysis
(E. Patterson et al.)
Using findings from studies of analysis, collaborative envisioning mechanisms were used to identify promising directions and design seeds to support information analysis and comprehension. Combining many perspectives from around industry and academia, groups brought new insighst to tackle the challenges of modern intelligence. Design seeds looked at technology forecasting and information dynamics, workflows for analyst perspective representation, and the implications of mathematical descriptions of collaborative metadata.
[PROJECTS]
What is the Opposite of Creeping Featurism?
(D. S. Lee, D. Woods, D. Kidwell, H. Tran)
Creeping featurism is a process that produces complexity cumulatively and inadvertently as each individual module seems appropriate when considered on its own. The analysis of different answers to the question of what is the opposite of creeping featurism leads to a new strategy based on tracking fitness in an innovation landscape.
[BOOK in progress]
overview of fitness management pdf
Scenarios As A Tool For Collaborative Envisioning
(J. Schoenwald, J. Tittle, M. Voshell & D. Woods)
The animock serves as a collaborative envisioning tool resulting in new possibilities for sensor technology in MOUT (see url: http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/productions/xcta). Combining the Topic Landscape and a simulation engine under the animock design provides narrative to envision and describe inherent complexities in general work, as well as new insight into specific difficulties faced in MOUT.
[TOPIC LANDSCAPE, THESIS]
overview pdf
Assessing Resilience and Safety of Offshore Helicopter Transportation
(T. da Mata, et al., Jose O. Gomes et al., and D. D. Woods
A resilience analysis of offshore helicopter transport operations for a large petrochemical company in Brazil. The analysis identifies gaps created by goal conflicts, tradeoffs, and weak plans/procedures. The gaps are points of brittleness that can contribute to potential future incidents and accidents.
[PAPER]
offshore helicopter safety pdf
Resilience: New Paradigm for Safety Management
~ New Book
~ International Symposium 06 link
~ Studies
~ Health Care overview pdf
~ Offshore Helicopter Safety pdf
~ Measures
~ Cross Checks study pdf
Information Analysis and Comprehension: How to Escape from Data Overload
~ CPoD Consortium Activities: Converging Perspectives on Data
~ Studies
~ Design Seeds
~ Teaching Resources
~ CPoD Summer Institute
Integrating Diverse Sensor ‘Feeds’
~ Human-Robot
~ Military Operations (MOUT, checkpoints)
~ Emergency Response
Design Envisoning
~ Animocking and Narratives pdf
~ De:Cycle framework for collaborative envisioning pdf
Metrics
~ Complexity Metrics e.g. Fractal pdf
~ Events and Attention e.g. mUMP pdf
Patterns in Joint Cognitive Systems at Work
New Book link
~ Coordination and Miscoordination (see People and Automation theme)
~ Resilience and Brittleness (see Resilience/Error theme
~ Affordance and Clumsiness (see Design theme)
~ Generic Requirements
Designing Joint Cognitive Systems that Work
~ Seeing patterns emerge
~ Making sense of change
~ Coordinating perspectives e.g. link
Studies of Joint Cognitive Systems at Work
~ Discovering How Joint Cognitive Systems Work
~ E.g. Study of Analysis pdf
Systems Engineering: New Approaches to Engineer Adaptive and Complex Systems
~ Teaching Resources
~ New approaches to R&D
Why does design get trapped producing inadvertent, cumulative complexity in use?
A new project by D. S. Lee, D. Woods, D. Kidwell and H. Tran
A study of heads up-heads down conflicts by D. Tuzar shows re-orienting cost as a measure of performance with computerized devices for multi-task situations.
Download media paper on the study driving study/design link
A. Roesler has developed a new model of perspective-taking as sensor and mobile robotic platforms provide remote observers with new ways to connect to distant situations. The model provides the principles of perspective-taking that enable shifting between views and the coordination of multiple views from sensors monitoring remote locations.
Putting new techniques in action: using TopicLandscapes, Animocks, and scenario-based design to support collaborative envisioning across practitioners, technologists, and cognitive engineers. The case is envisioning the role of new sensor technologies in military urban operations.
Production at url MOUT TopicLandscape or download draft paper Collabortive envisioning for MOUT pdf
For the theory see:
Practice-Centered Design link
Envisioned World Problem link
Northwest Passage in Design link
For the techniques see:
Animocks link
TopicLandscapes link
Part of a team with OSU Computer Vision researchers that won an intense competition under NSF's Information Technology Research for National Priorities (ITR) program for a $1.3 million project on Multi-level, Active Attention Surveillance.
This is in an important recognition of the scientific value of CSEL work on event pattern recognition and collaborative autonomy in human-machine decision making.
Also example of successful interdisciplinary work, as stated in the NSF reviews and summary, “The review panel was very impressed with the well-integrated multidisciplinary team assembled to execute this research.” "Their multi-disciplinary team has formed a coherent research proposal that effectively leverages the capabilities inherent in each discipline to pursue a common goal." "systems such as that proposed here, that augment the capabilities of humans -- based on recognition and understanding of the limitations of the human sensory and cognitive systems -- will be essential in a world where data stream growth far outstrips the capabilities of humans to process directly."
Klein, G., Woods. D.D., Bradshaw, J., Hoffman, R.R., and Feltovich, P.J., (2004). Ten Challenges for Making Automation a “Team Player” in Joint Human-Agent Activity. IEEE Intelligent Systems, November/December, 91-95.
The goal of safety management is to monitor and enhance resilience. Developing the tools for Resilience Engineering and Management is a major research thrust and the work is beginning to be applied to aerospace, health care and process industries.
See the entry on the recent Symposium on Resilience Engineering.
Publications introducing concepts for Resilience Engineering include:
Woods, D. D. (in press). Creating Foresight: Lessons for Resilience from Columbia. In M. Farjoun and William Starbuck (eds.), Organization at the Limit: NASA and the Columbia Disaster. Blackwell.
E. S. Patterson, R.I. Cook and D.D. Woods. Gaps and Resilience. In M. S. Bogner (ed.) Human Error in Medicine, second edition. Erlbaum, in press.
Woods, D.D. (2005). Conflicts between Learning and Accountability in Patient Safety. DePaul Law Review. in press.
Patterson, E. S., Cook, R. I., Woods, D.D. and Render, M.L. (2004). Examining the Complexity Behind a Medication Error: Generic Patterns in Communication. IEEE SMC Part A, 34(6), 749-756.
R.I. Cook, M.L. Render and D.D. Woods. Gaps in the continuity of care and progress on patient safety. British Medical Journal, 320, 791—794, March 18, 2000.
De:Cycle is a framework for coordinating different roles and activities in a complete practiced-centered design process. For an overview see the draft paper Inventing the Future of Cognitive Work pdf
The project seeks to develop new means to establish functional presence for remote robot handlers and problem holders and to study how enhanced functional presence supports coordinated activity in teams of people and robots such as in urban operations, search and rescue and first response.
The Remote Perception problem: The cues to depth are limited or ambiguous when exploring a remote environment from the video provided by a robot. This limited visual information leads to various difficulties for robot handlers, including misperceived scale of obstacles or passages being traversed by a robot, and difficulty creating mental maps of the remote environment. This project is developing several promising concepts to enhance remote perception based on new multi-camera visual displays such as multi-view and spherical perspective folding. Studying functional presence required development of test bed and simulation capabilities. A rapid prototyping virtual environment for studying functional presence is being developed as well based on the Raven shield game engine.
These Laws synthesize basic findings about the nature of cognitive work and how to support it. Discussions among research teams within the ADA CTA have used these Laws to develop a set of basic functions that define how to support cognitive work (Figure 1). High performance cognitive work depends on providing support for Coordination and for Resilience. Klein, Feltovich, Bradshaw and Woods (in press) provide the basic criteria for supporting coordinated activity in terms of anticipation, synchronization, and shared commitment to balance multiple goals. In the previous work on ‘Laws” and under RT 04TA4-SP1-RT2, Woods developed criteria for Resilience in terms of terms of how broadening checks produce convergence and avoid premature narrowing in cognitive work. Coordination and Resilience are each supported by 5 functions: Observability (feedback that provides insight into a process), Directability (ability to direct/re-direct resources, activities, priorities as situations change and escalate), Control of Attention (ability to re-orient focus in a changing world), Inter-predictability (building and testing a common ground across distributed agents), and Shifting Perspectives (contrasting points of view). Previous work in the ADA CTA has developed means for fusing data through event patterns to achieve observability, providing control of perspective in 3-D displays, providing multiple perspectives to aid in perceiving remote environments through robotic sensors, and enhancing the control of attention through multimodal interfaces.
A common challenge, shared by managers, analysts, and operators, is to be able to monitor a dynamic, unfolding situation based on disparate data from multiple data sources that might be uncertain, incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated. Extracting meaning from this flow of data requires recognition of events. Consistently, research finds that practitioners reason and interact in terms of event patterns, meaningful changes over time, e.g., loss of signal, battery discharging, and computer re-booting. These events are based on relationships across data, across time, and relative to the background of expectations, planned activities, team structures, and goals.
Events are generally not directly perceivable from monitoring and control displays, unless display systems have been specifically designed to recognize, capture and share events. Sophisticated support for apprehending, understanding, and communicating event patterns and interactions will be a critical path in future combat and intelligence systems. To make event patterns a basic building block of visualization, collaboration, analysis, prediction, decision, and action, research is needed to:
1. Develop representations and information systems where the basic unit is change (differences against background) as opposed to static properties of the environment.
2. Shift data processing and display to center on events structures that are patterns of change –- events extend over time with complex internal structures.
3. Make observer perspective or point of view is a central variable in the definition and extraction of events, i.e., how change is perceived is observer- and context-conditioned.
4. Develop computation and visualization around context sensitive layers of event structures that compose narratives.
Current research project: see
Christoffersen, K., Woods,, D. D. and Blike, G. T. (2001). Extracting Event Patterns From Telemetry Data. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 45th annual meeting. 8-12 October, Minneapolis, MN.
Christoffersen, K., Blike, G. T., and Woods, D. D. (2003). Discovering the Events Expert Practitioners Find Meaningful in Dynamic Data Streams. Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory, Institute for Ergonomics, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH.
Christoffersen, K., Woods,, D. D. and Blike, G. T. (2002). Making Sense of Change: Extracting Events From Dynamic Process Data. . Institute for Ergonomics/Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory Report, ERGO-CSEL 01-TR-02. May 31, 2002.
The role of common ground in modifying plans in progress.
G. Klein, A. Armstrong , D. Woods, M. Gokulachandra and H. A. Klein. Cognitive Wavelength: The Role of Common Ground in Distributed Replanning. Technical Report AFRL-HE-WP-TR-2001-0029, Wright Patterson Air Force Research Laboratory, September 2000.