Human Factors and Ergonomics Society at the University of Virginia

Events 10/6/2009: SMC Practice Presentation When: Tuesday Oct. 6, 3-4:30pm Where: Former Reactor -Bass/Gerling conference room What: Don Rude will present: Rude, D. J., Bass, E. J. & Philips, B. (2009). Impact of increased spatio-temporal radar data resolution on forecaster wind assessments. Justin DeVoge will present: DeVoge, J.M., Bass, E. J., Atia, M, Bond, M., Waggoner-Fountain, L., & Borowitz, S.M. (2009). The development of a web-based resident sign-out training program. . Matthew Bolton will present: Bolton, M. L. & Bass, E. J. (2009). Enhanced Operator Function Model: A generic human task behavior modeling language. 9/23/2009: HFES National Awards Leigh has been selected as a Student Member with Honors which is the highest honor that a student can earn in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She joins Justin DeVoge and Matthew Bolton who have also achieved that level of recognition. Also, our outstanding activities from the past year have qualified us as being named a Gold Level Chapter. The official presentation of the award will take place Tuesday evening (Oct 20), during the Student Reception at the HFES Annual Meeting. 9/23/2009: Human Factors Talk C. Michael Holloway, Senior Research Engineer, NASA Langley Research Center Title: Why Engineers Should Read Accident Reports 6/4/2009: HFES Talk Dr. Friedrich G. Barth, University of Vienna Title: Sensory Systems: Design Without Designer 4/27/2009: HFES Talk Bruce H. Thomas, University of South Australia Title: Augmented Reality X-Ray Vision 2/27/2009: HFES Talk Tohru Yagi, Tokyo Institute of Technology Title: Introduction to Neural Interfaces 2/26/2009: HFES Talk M. Norman Oliver, University of Virginia Title: Race, Poverty, and Prostate Cancer: Spatial Analyses and Beyond 2/2/2009: HFES Talk Andreas Savvides, Yale University Title: Detecting and Interpreting Human Behaviors Using Wireless Sensors 1/29/2009: HFES Talk Manoj Srinivasan, Princeton University Title: Why Walk and Run: Toward a Complete Predictive Theory of Legged Locomotion 12/8/2008: New officers elected Student chapter elections have ended. Please check out the officers page. 11/24/2008: HFES Talk Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, University of Colorado, Boulder Title: End-User Program Analysis for Data Structures 11/7/2008: HFES Talk Henry Fuchs, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Title: Immersive Integration of Physical and Virtual Environments 10/25/2008: Human Factors Research Symposium The HFES student chapter is sponsoring a trip to Virginia Tech for students and faculty. For more information about the symposium please visit http://www.hfes.org.vt.edu/index.php. UVa participants: Dr. Stephanie Guerlain - Keynote speaker Ted & Justin - Poster Don - Presentation Matthew - Presentation Daine - Presentation Miki - Presentation 10/22/2008: Dr. Stephanie Guerlain featured in two articles. The Cavalier Daily SEAS e-News online 9/12/2008: Awards HFES awards Gold Level status to the our student chapter! Dave Bauer and Matthew Bolton accepted the award for us at the HFES annual meeting. Click here for a photo. 5/5/2008: HFES Talk Jack Smith, Center for Clinical Translational Science, University of Texas Title: Translational Research Informatics 4/24/2008: HFES Talk Ben Shneiderman, Human Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland Title: Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery 11/9/2007: HFES Talk Mark W. Scerbo, Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University Title: Developments in Medical Modeling and Simulation 10/26/2007: HFES Talk Nitish Thakor, Neuroengineering and Biomedical Instrumentation Lab, Johns Hopkins University Title: Feasibility of Dexterous Hand Manipulation through Brain Machine Interface 10/19/2007: HFES Talk Thenkurussi Kesavadas, Virtual Reality Lab, University of Buffalo Title: Sympathetic Haptics: A New Approach for Learning Motor Skills 07/12/2007: New officers New officers have been elected. Please see the officers tab for more detail. 12/14/2006: HFES Talk Greg A. Jamieson, Ph.D. will be delivering a talk on Thursday (12/14/06) at 1:30 in Olsson 002. Dr. Jamieson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto and is a director of its Cognitive Engineering Laboratory. His research interests include the analysis of work in complex systems, the design of interfaces, and cognitive engineering applications in process control, finance, environment, and other emerging areas. His talk is titled “Ecological interface design for the condenser subsystems of a boiling water reactor.” Abstract: Ecological interfaces provide support to operators during both anticipated and unanticipated events as they are designed to be (a) physically and functionally faithful representations of the work domain, and (b) compatible with human information processing mechanisms. A corpus of empirical evidence provides support for these claims. However, the Ecological Interface Design (EID) literature offers few proofs-of-concept at an industrial scale and fewer evaluations under representative conditions in the process industries. In an effort to demonstrate that EID is viable in the nuclear domain, we have developed a proof-of-concept interface for supervisory control of a boiling water reactor. In this talk, I will describe the analysis and design path for the condenser subsystems of the interface, with specific reference to work domain modeling and the Skills, Rules, Knowledge taxonomy. I will also outline a simulator study conducted to evaluate the interfaces and present some initial results from that study. 10/16/2006: HFES Annual Meeting Matthew Bolton and Dave Bauer will be presenting talks at the HFES Annual Meeting in San Fransisco. Former HFES memebers Leigh Baumgart, Rick Sledd, and Kelly O'Hargan will also be presenting papers. 10/05/2006: HFES Seminar Dave Bauer will be presenting his HFES annual meeting lecture at this weeks seminar. 09/21/2006: HFES Seminar Fred O'Bryant will be discussing library resource that may help facilitate HFES research at UVA. 09/07/2006: HFES Seminar Stephanie Guerlain will be discussing a resource allocation planning system this week at the HFES Seminar. 08/31/2006: HFES Seminar Jeff Boyd will be discussing a website he developped to visualize lightnening data and gather customers feedback on Thursdays at 4:00 PM in Olsson 111. The first will be held on 8/31. The seminar topic will be announced shortly. 08/22/2006: Activities Fair Come see the HFES booth at the UVA activities fair in the amphitheater from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Multiple research demos will be presented. 08/20/2006: HFES Official Student Organization The HFES@UVA student chapter has been recognized as an official student organization. 08/15/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), presentations will be given concerning the work Jacob Scanlon and Curtis Myzie have been doing this summer. 08/08/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Daine Lesniake will be discussing the neural basis of touch, neural coding, neural engineering, and an investigation that is currently being planned. 08/01/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM),we will be discussing how we will represent the University of Virginia at this years HFES annual meeting. Please read the official announcement here, and come prepared to have a discussion. 07/25/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Dave Bauer will be talking about the use of flowsheets in pediatric intensive care, applying the abstraction decomposition space to intentional systems, and potential designs for electronic flowsheets. He will also spend some time discussing the use of the abstraction decomposition hierarchy. 07/17/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Sarah Rigsbee will be presenting on her research. The goal of this research is to design and build two physical simulators to help train and teach palpation skills to medical students. Her research focuses specifically on the thyroid and prostate and the various diseases and cancers that pertain to those two glands. This talk will be geared toward the current statistics, problems, and issues in the training of medical students. She will cover the relevant anatomy, diseases, cancer statistics, current detection methods and lack of standards, and then how her physical simulator will make a contribution. 07/11/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Doug Lee will be speaking about issues related to his research on the still-developing on-demand air transportation and very light jet (VLJ) industry.  He will be giving an overview of recent developments in this industry, as well as an overview of most of the research in this area.  He will also be discussing some of the general questions which he is am attempting to address in his research. 06/27/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Justin Devoge will be discussing some ideas related to non-parametric statistics. He will give a very brief intro then focus mainly on issues he encountered with non-parametric statistics in his MS research. 06/20/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Jonathan Evans will speak about his hopeful Master's research topic. He will explain what he is investigating at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, and touch on some of the topics he hopes to explore in his thesis. These topics include attention management, cognitive aging, and language processing. 06/13/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES@UVA seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Matthew Bolton will be discussing his master’s research which attempted to quantify pilot spatial awareness in Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) displays as a function of the terrain texture and field of view. This particular talk will focus on the experimental design and data analysis procedures he used in this experiment. It will focus on repeated measures analysis of variance, sphericity, and post hoc multiple comparison methods. 06/06/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar This week at the HFES@UVA seminar (Olsson 111 at 1:00 PM), Doruk Akan will be talking about bioinformatics. Doruk is going to provide a broad overview of the discipline with areas of interest for systems engineering. No materials to peruse beforehand. Come learn about: How the human genome was sequenced What a genome is What the deal is with DNA and proteins Why a sequenced genome is only the first step Why biology must have a systems appoach What Doruk's project is What possible research avenues there are for systems engineers More 06/01/2006: HCIL Symposium HFES@UVA is organizing a group to go to the annual HCIL Symposium on June 1st (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/soh/index.shtml) Admission to the conference is free, and lunch will be provided. Please contact Dave Bower if you are interested in attending. 05/31/2006: Web Conference Presentation Yukari (Carrie) Enomoto will present a talk on "Effects of Decision Support on Cardiac Telephone Consultation Process" at 7:00 PM. It will be shown in Olsson 111. Nursing Cordinators (NCs) at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI) fields phone calls from patients who have been discharged and are undergoing home care procedures at a daily basis. The CARDIO project aims to provide tools for the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) that NCs can use during the phone calls. The Ecological Interface Design (EID) approach is used to identify the information requirements to design the system. Major challenges of the telephone consultation process that are additionally identified by literature review and interviewing the NCs included visibility of patients, individual differences, and lack of standardized procedures. A combination of decision trees and visualization techniques is proposed to aid the process. Implementation of decision trees would help unload mental workload especially accesses to "knowledge in the head" as well as facilitate expert knowledge transfer to less experienced nurses. Visualization tools display integration of multiple-cues from patients in an abstract nature and can be accessed by users at any point of decision process. Preliminary experiment with static images showed that visualization tools helped the decision makers more when the judgement tasks were more complex. A new integrative tool was designed for the second experiment using simulated phone consultations taskes. The conference site can be found here. If you need instructions for joining this conference, email a request to Gavan Lintern. 05/30/2006: Weekly HFES Seminar HFES@UVA is hosting a weekly seminar every tuesday at 1:00 PM in Olsson 111 where HFES students will be presenting topics related to their research. The first presenter will be Brendan Hogan, who will be talking about airspace congestion pricing. Congestion pricing (also called "value pricing") has been studied for a while in the context of ground transportation. It basically has to do with charging more for access to resources during peak times, so as to encourage a more even distribution of demand and a more efficient overall use of available resources. A variant on this is how hotels and airlines get away with charging higher prices during peak demand periods. It's just for revenue management as opposed to congestion management in the case of hotels and airline tickets, but it's a related concept that I'm sure you've experienced. Congestion pricing in ground transportation is starting to be implemented in different forms in places like London, San Diego, and Minneapolis. If you are interested in some general background on the concept you could check out this webpage: http://www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/slp/projects/conpric/index.htm In my seminar I'll talk about why this approach has not been used before (or ever really studied) in dealing with airspace congestion, and why I feel now is the right time to pursue this research path. I'll describe the general approach I have in mind to address the problem, and some of the challenges I expect to run into. If you've read this far, and are curious about some of the issues that would be involved in an airspace congestion pricing situation you could check out this page courtesy our friends in Europe: http://www.eurocontrol.be/care-innov/public/standard_page/project2002_ircs.html 05/13/2006: HFES Baseball Event The HFES@UVA will be attending the UVA Men’s Baseball game on Saturday May 13th at 1:00 pm. The event is being coordinated by Justin DeVoge. Send an e-mail to jmd9x@virginia.edu if you are interested in attending. 05/03/2006: Talk on Simulating Human Physiology in the Health Care System David Ross will be giving a talk entitled "Simulating Human Physiology in the Health Care System" on 05/03/2006 from 1:30 - 2:30 in Olsson 005. Modeling and simulation, and quantitative methods more generally, are established in many niches of medical science. PK/PD simulations support virtually all FDA applications. Clinical trials are grounded in rigorous statistical standards. The burgeoning field of bioinformatics has grown up around problems in gene sequencing. Computer simulations shape research in artificial heart valves, artificial limbs, cancer cell growth, blood chemistry. In this talk, Dr. Ross will discuss the development and application of a different sort of computer simulation, one with an unusually broad scope: a simulation of the physiological essentials of members of a demographically realistic population. In these simulations, patients with simulated hearts and brains and endocrine systems get diseases, are treated in a simulated health care system, get simulated drugs, and in various other ways mimic the experiences of real patients. Dr. Ross with discuss the general structure of such simulations. He will give examples of the development of particular models used in these simulations, and will give an overview of some technical problems that arise in developing such simulations. Finally, he will discuss applications of these simulations to problems in drug research and health policy. 04/28/2006: HFES@UVA SIEDS Awards HFES@UVA student member Matthew Bolton was the lead author of the paper "Assessment and Enhancement of Synthetic Vision Systems Experimentation Software" which was presented the best paper award for the Human Computer Interface track at the 2006 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium. 04/28/2006: HFES@UVA at SIEDS Members of HFES@UVA will be presenting papers at the 2006 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium in Charlottesville VA. More information can be found here. 04/07/2006: Virtual Presentation Steven Sloman's presentation "Causal Reasoning and Decision Making: Imagination and Choice as Interventions" will be held at 1:00-2:00 p.m. ET A framework for reasoning about causality has been developed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993) and is reviewed in Pearl (2000). The fundamental idea is that people represent the world by decomposing it into autonomous causal mechanisms that support interventions. On this view, human reasoning is understood as a tool to support human action. I report studies showing that people are highly sensitive to the logic of intervention when reasoning counterfactually, a logic that cannot be reduced to a set of possibilities without a prior causal analysis. The application of the ideas to decision making reveals that good decisions depend on causal analysis and that preferential choice is a form of intervention. I report further studies revealing some of the conditions under which people's choices display this form of rationality. 03/29/2006: Virtual Presentation Ben Shneiderman's virtual presentation "The Thrill of Discovery- Accelerating Information Exploration" will be presented in Olsson 111 at 11:00 AM. Exceptional tools for information visualization are becoming more widely used to gain competitive advantages, but the best is yet to come. The next generation of interactive tools will enable communities of users to make successful business decisions even more rapidly. Advances to look for include: 1) systematic strategies for discovery that incorporate the increasingly powerful statistical tools and data mining methods, while accommodating missing and uncertain data. 2) increasingly diverse data types such as time series, patient histories, maps, and social networks, so users can handle a wider array of problems. 3) tighter integration into organizational workflows that amplify individual creativity with the catalytic benefits of social creativity. These ambitious aspirations are already motivating researchers and inspiring developers. This webcast tours current efforts and proposes grand challenges. Please join us for this informative event. 03/03/2006: HFES Student Research Presentations at the Systems and Information Engineering Prospective Student Day HFES student members will be giving demonstrations of their research at the Systems and Information Engineering Prospective Student Day. Feel free to come by from 11:00 - 2:00 to find out what your fellow students have been working on. 02/26/2006: HFES Student Research Presentations at the SEAS Open House HFES student members will be giving demonstrations of their research at the SEAS open house. 02/23/2006: Seminar on How Fingertip Skin Microstructures Enhance Touch Sensation Greg Gerling will be givning a seminar for the department of Mechanical and Aerospance engineering at 3:30 PM in MEC 305. In this talk, we Professor Gerling describe how our fingertip skin enhances tactile sensation. Solid mechanics models are used to analyze how particular skin microstructures, nearby the slowly adapting type I (SAI) tactile receptors, affect the conversion of edge indentation into coded, neural signals. Results help better explain the SA-I receptors’ neural response and physiological position and may inform the design of electro-mechanical sensors that could interface with the neural system. Emerging from this work is a speculative but intriguing new model of the interaction of skin microstructures with SAI receptors: the lens analogy. This analogy suggests that fingerpad skin microstructure may serve to focus stress/strain to the SA-I receptors just as a convex lens serves to focus light to a point. 02/17/2006 1:00-2:00 pm: Virtual Colloquium There will be a virtual colloquium on Culture, Expertise and Resource Conflict: Why Meanings Matter This talk describes an approach to culture and cognition where within group variability is treated as signal, not noise. This view is illustrated for the case of conflict over natural resources among Native-American and European-American hunters and fishermen in Wisconsin. I argue that an analysis in terms of different utilities or super-ordinate goals fails to illuminate the nature of the conflict. Instead our observations suggest that differences in conceptual organization and mental models of nature give rise to meaning differences that mediate misperceptions and stereotyping. It will be presented by Doug Medin, a Professor of Psychology, and Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. 02/02/2006: ERICA and Chris Lankford to be featured on ER ERICA(Eyegaze Response Interface Computer Aid) system will be featured in a February 2 episode of ER. Guest star James Woods, playing a patient suffering from ALS, will use the ERICA system to communicate throughout the show.  Eye Response Technologies chief technology officer and UVA grad Chris Lankford spent over a week on the set supporting the ER staff, controlling the equipment via a remote mouse and keyboard, and appearing for a moment as a hospital technician. ERICA, originally developed at UVA by Professor Emeritus Thomas Hutchinson, gives computer access to persons with disabilities allowing complete control over the computer through eye movement alone. More on ERICA. 01/09/2006: HFES@UVA at AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit Justin DeVoge will be presenting the following talk at the 44th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit in Reno, Nevada: Atmospheric icing plays a critical role in the daily responsibilities and decision making of airline flight dispatchers. To maintain safety, airlines must be sure that dispatchers are trained to a deep understanding of this topic. It is difficult, however, for current training programs to review icing to the depth that is necessary. In addition, systematically designed training products focusing on atmospheric icing do not exist for flight dispatchers. Flight dispatchers and instructors express the need for systematically designed icing training products standardized for flight dispatchers. The field of instructional systems design (ISD) offers methods for the creation of such products. In recognition of the need for flight dispatcher centered training products, this paper discusses the development of a preliminary icing training system for flight dispatchers, framed within a modern ISD model. It focuses on the higher and lower level instructional goals, the content to achieve these goals, and the evaluation materials and strategy to assess the training system. 12/11/2005: New Website The new website has been completed. 11/22/2005: New Officers New officers have been elected. Please see the officers section for detailes. 10/10/2005: HFES@UVA at SMC 2005 Matthew Bolton will be presenting the following talk at the 2005 Conference on Systems Man and Cybernetics in Waikoloa Hawaii: There is a lack of educational technology to support cognitive systems engineering topics such as models of human performance in dynamic environments. This paper describes the Cognitive Systems Engineering Educational Software (CSEES) system, an integrated toolset designed to facilitate curricula related to human judgment and decision-making performance modeling and evaluation. CSEES provides students with the means to generate and analyze performance data using multiple methods. It also includes documentation and tutorials. Its flexible design facilitates adding new judgment and decision making task environments. The paper describes the initial system implementation as a Microsoft Excel addon, a preliminary evaluation as part of a graduate engineering course, and planned future work.