At the Sydney Opera House in 2006, during the trip for the Intelligent User Interface 2006 Conference. (Photo: Jean Scholtz)
Dr. Jill Lynn Drury, jldrury (at) mitre.org
At the Sydney Opera House in 2006, during the trip for the Intelligent User Interface 2006 Conference. (Photo: Jean Scholtz)
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The one-sentence summary of my research interests is: I wish to evaluate and optimize human interaction technology and work processes to support team-based decision-making in safety-critical applications. There are many concepts represented in this sentence, which are easiest to discuss in reverse order.
Leveson (1986) defined safety-critical systems as: “complex, time-critical physical processes or mechanical devices, where a run-time error or failure could result in death, injury, loss of property, or environmental harm.” Two examples of safety-critical situations are robot search and rescue (because robots need to quickly locate victims but avoid further injuring them) and air defense (because operators must quickly determine whether an unidentified aircraft is a “friend or foe”). I am excited by both the importance and challenges of safety-critical domains that impose requirements for error-free and efficient interaction. Besides the domains cited above I have worked with command and control systems (e.g., Drury and Cuomo, 1997), unmanned aerial vehicles (e.g., see Drury, Richer, Rackliffe, and Goodrich, 2006), and (most recently) hazardous materials handling.
The air defense example illustrates the importance of providing technology, for example in the form of fused information displays, which supports efficient and accurate decision-making. I have used cognitive task analysis methods such as Militello and Hutton’s (1998) Applied Cognitive Task Analysis technique to determine the major cognitive challenges for command and control center operators (Drury and Darling, 2008). There is little consensus, however, on how to incorporate what we know about cognition into interaction designs.
There is even less consensus on how to best support team-based decision-making, even though many safety-critical systems are large-scale, multi-user systems that require some level of coordination or collaboration prior to making decisions and/or completing tasks. One approach I have taken is to decompose the awareness needs of team members within a particular domain: both about each other and about the environment in which they are making decisions (the latter being usually called “situation awareness”). For example, I decomposed team awareness needs, starting with the two overall categories of presence/identity and activities, in Drury and Williams (2002). Simply having information isn’t sufficient for making good decisions, but in many real-life cases I have studied, people either do not have the necessary information, the information is not efficiently accessible, or is presented in a way that causes the user to understand it in a way other than what was intended. Getting this part of the equation right is a pre-requisite for more sophisticated means of providing support for team-based decision-making.
Sometimes the right approach to aiding team-based decision-making is not to provide any new technology at all. Rather, a team’s work processes may be suboptimal, resulting in decreased efficiency or accuracy. I always try to observe people in their normal work environment, for example using the ethnographic technique known as Contextual Inquiry (Holtzblatt and Jones, 1993), to determine the combination of interaction technology and work processes that may be appropriate. We used this technique with a military planning group (Swanson, Drury, and Lewis, 2004) and our recommendations included changing the format of an important daily meeting to make better use of the group’s time as well as the use of a tool already present in the group’s collaborative tool suite.
Regardless of whether new processes or new technologies are being proposed, evaluation methods are key to both ensuring that the user’s experience will be improved and that research progress has occurred. It is usually more difficult to employ human-computer interaction techniques for multi-user, rather than single-user, systems (and especially synchronous, non-collocated systems) because of the challenge of running tests with multiple people in multiple places simultaneously (or simulating such conditions). In my thesis work I developed the Synchronous Collaboration Awareness and Privacy Evaluation (SCAPE) method (Drury, 2001) to provide a fine-grained understanding of how well an application supports awareness of team members’ presence/identity and activities when such an understanding is appropriate, and team members’ privacy when the information needs to be protected.
I characterize the best of my work as being foundational, interdisciplinary, and collaborative (in the sense of having been developed in conjunction with very talented colleagues). For example, our decomposition of awareness needs for unmanned aerial vehicles (Drury, Riek, and Rackliffe, 2006) has provided a foundation upon which to build displays for these airborne robots. Our taxonomy of human-robot interaction (Yanco and Drury, 2004) is widely cited and is often used in human-robot interaction courses. I have used techniques, concepts, and approaches from HCI and computer-supported cooperative work when researching human-robot interaction. For example, we adapted HCI techniques to be more appropriate for use with robotics, resulting in different kinds of metrics for usability testing (Yanco, Drury, and Scholtz, 2004) and new “operators” (users’ actions or operations upon the system) for the Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules (GOMS) method (Drury, Scholtz, and Kieras, 2007). Finally, I have benefited from publishing with three dozen distinguished colleagues, including an MIT-trained roboticist, Prof. Holly Yanco of the University of Massachusetts Lowell; a co-developer of GOMS, Prof. David Kieras of the University of Michigan; and a renowned HCI metrics developer, Dr. Jean Scholtz of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (formerly the National Institute of Standards and Technology). A summary of the people I am currently collaborating with can be seen on my collaborations page.
REFERENCES
Drury, J. (2001). Extending Usability Inspection Evaluation Techniques for Synchronous Collaborative Computing Applications. Sc.D. Thesis, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Department of Computer Science, November.
Drury, J., and Cuomo, D. (1997). Usability Issues in Complex Government Systems. NIST Special Publication 500-237, Symposium Transcription, Usability Engineering: Industry-Government Collaboration for System Effectiveness and Efficiency. Gaithersburg, MD, February 1996.
Drury, J. L. and Darling, E. (in press). A “Thin-Slicing” Approach to Understanding Cognitive Challenges in Real-Time Command and Control. Journal of Battlefield Technology, Vol 11(1), March 2008.
Drury, J. L., Richer, J., Rackliffe, N. and Goodrich, M. A. (2006). Comparing Situation Awareness for two Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Human Interface Approaches. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, August 2006.
Drury, J. L., Riek, L., and Rackliffe, N. (2006). A Decomposition of UAV-Related Situation Awareness. In Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Salt Lake City, UT, March 2006.
Drury, J. L., Scholtz, J. and Kieras, D. (2007). The Potential for Modeling Human-Robot Interaction with GOMS. In Human-Robot Interaction, Nilanjan Sarkar, Ed. Vienna, Austria: I-Tech Education and Publishing, pp. 21 – 38.
Drury, J. and Williams, M. G. (2002). A Framework for Role-Based Specification and Evaluation of Awareness Support in Synchronous Collaborative Applications. In Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE) 2002, Pittsburgh, June 2002.
Holtzblatt, K. and Jones, S. (1993). Contextual Inquiry: A Participatory Technique for Systems Design. In D. Schuler and A. Namioka (eds.), Participatory Design: Principles and Practice, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 177-210.
Leveson, N. G. (1986). Software Safety: Why, What and How. ACM Computing Surveys 18(2): 125 – 162, June.
Militello, L.G. and Hutton, R.J.B. (1998). Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA): A Practitioner’s Toolkit for Understanding Cognitive Task Demands. Ergonomics, Vol. 41(11), pp.1618–1641.
Swanson, K., Drury, J. and Lewis, R. (2004). A Study of Collaborative Work Practices in a Joint Military Setting. In Proceedings of the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2004.
Yanco, H. A. and Drury, J. (2004). Classifying Human-Robot Interaction: An Updated Taxonomy. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, The Hague, The Netherlands, October 2004.
Yanco, H. A., Drury, J. L. and Scholtz, J. (2004). Beyond Usability Evaluation: Analysis of Human-Robot Interaction at a Major Robotics Competition. Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 19, Numbers 1 and 2, pp. 117-149.
Updated 8 December 2007.