Laura Strater

Raytheon Technologies | RTN · IIS

In high tempo, high stakes military applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), operators need to rapidly understand the strengths and limitations of their AI/ML aides, so that the combined human + AI team can provide decision superiority. As AI agents become more sophisticated, operators need transparency in these advan...

Human performance modeling (HPM) can be an effective tool to use for determining crew designs. Crew design includes determining the number of operators needed, the role of automation, and member task responsibilities required to operate a system. Without effective measures of performance and thresholds for assessing success, design decisions from H...

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics to non-game activities (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). This concept has received a lot of recent interest from industry and many examples have emerged, especially within the fields of business and marketing, but has grown to encompass such varied examples as health care, training, pr...

Virtual environments, augmented reality, serious games, simulations, and other digitally mediated experiences are revolutionizing the way that we work, learn, and interact with people and systems. The employment of these technologies is driving innovation in research, training, education, evaluation, and various business endeavors. This session wil...

Decision recommendation systems relieve operators from high cognitive-load during stressful situations. However, automation over-trust can disengage complacent operators from the task leading to lower situation awareness and inability to intervene and override incorrect recommendations. Our recent research effort was focused on a visualization of a...

This paper describes the strengths oftwo types of visual aids: VADS (Visualization of Agent Decision Space) and ADT (Agent Decision Table). The V ADS is a newly developed visual aid that intuitively represents complicated target attributes in a graphical form, whereas the ADT shows such things in a traditional tabular form. The strengths of each vi...

With the constant push to do more for less, the use of virtual environments (VE), simulations and serious games has exploded. Human Factors (HF) personnel often use these tools to support a range of activities, including modeling process or the effects of humans in the system; designing, testing and validating new systems and processes; training sk...

Virtual environments, simulations and serious games are increasingly being employed for research, training, education, evaluation, and various business endeavors. In a redux of a favorite session from HFES 2012, this session will describe and demonstrate some of the diverse uses for virtual environments (VEs) in an alternate demonstration format. T...

In the complex operational environments that prevail in many organizations, successful operations depend more on the ability to adapt to novel, emerging situations, rather than repeating a learned, proscribed task sequence. In these situations, the cognitive readiness of the individuals and teams involved is critical to insuring mission success. Ou...

Virtual environments, simulations and serious games are increasingly being employed for research, training, education, evaluation, and various business endeavors. This session will describe and demonstrate some of the diverse uses for virtual environments (VEs) in an alternate demonstration format. The session will begin with demonstrators providin...

This paper describes the strengths of two types of visual aids: VADS (Visualization of Agent Decision Space) and ADT (Agent Decision Table). The VADS is a newly developed visual aid that intuitively represents complicated target attributes in a graphical form, whereas the ADT shows such things in a traditional tabular form. The strengths of each vi...

Situation Awareness (SA) for cyber defense consists of at least seven aspects: 1. Be aware of the current situation. This aspect can also be called situation perception. Situation perception includes both situation recognition and identification. Situation identification can include identifying the type of attack (recognition is only recognizing th...

This book chapter summarizes a series of human-AI collaborative decision-making studies that provide an initial evidence that human understanding about the potential errors of AI can help humans to have a suitable level of trust calibration about AI.

Recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have confirmed that in order to achieve effective Network-Centric Operations (NCO), innovative enhancement to military decision-making is desired. Required are processes and computational models that support the decision-makers' experience while promoting high levels of shared situation awareness (SA)-not o...

Operator performance in robotics tasks is impacted by the situation awareness (SA) that individuals or teams are able to acquire and maintain on the robot, the associated environments, and the tasks to be completed. SA can be influenced by team processes when multiple humans must work together for coordinating control of multiple robotic systems. I...

This symposium presents papers and panel discussions describing research approaches for leveraging the capabilities of virtual reality and advanced computer-based games for military training. A military SME will serve as a panel discussant to provide insight and concerns from the perspective of end users, both trainees and instructors. Cases and de...

This paper presents the development of a subjective shared situation awareness (SA) inventory for distributed teams. Items populating the inventory were developed to incorporate participants' perceptions on key elements of SA, including the sufficiency of shared SA requirements, mechanisms, processes and devices. This inventory was administered dur...

This paper reports an ongoing effort that supports NASA research in Airportal Transition and Integration Management as NASA prepares for the challenges anticipated with the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The NASA Airportal Project is directed toward achieving increases in capacity and throughput in the terminal area, while mai...

The term situation awareness (SA) has been around since World War II. Although originally associated with military pilots, over the last several years it has emerged as a field of research in its own right and is now being examined in other domains, such as army operations, air traffic control (ATC), nuclear power plant operation, and medical appli...

This research details findings from Urban Resolve, a large-scale Joint Forces research effort to investigate the impacts of technological solutions on situation awareness (SA) and decision making in ad hoc teams in a military command and control environment. The investigation was conducted using personnel acting as the Joint Force Land Component Co...

Human operators of robotic systems need to be able to acquire and maintain situation awareness (SA) in many domains in order to effectively task and control unmanned systems. Overall task performance is impacted by the SA that individuals or teams develop on the robot, the remote environment, and the tasks to be completed. Situation awareness can b...

The cognitive processes underlying collaboration and knowledge interoperability are challenged in team-based multi-vehicle supervisory control beyond those typically found in solitary unmanned vehicle (UV) control. This paper addresses the application of SA-Oriented Design principles to the development of collaborative control interfaces that enabl...

Motivation - To investigate ways to support human-automation teams with real-world, imperfect automation where many system failures are the result of systematic failure. Research approach - An experimental approach was used to investigate how variance in agent reliability may influence human's trust and subsequent reliance on agent's decision aids....

There is a growing reliance on automation (e.g., intelligent agents, semi-autonomous robotic systems) to effectively execute increasingly cognitively complex tasks. Successful team performance for such tasks has become even more dependent on team cognition, addressing both human-human and human-automation teams. Team cognition can be viewed as the...

The present study investigated the effectiveness of different icon modalities in supporting situation awareness (SA) when using a densely populated battlefield COP. The MilSTD 2525B symbology was compared to modified versions of this symbology that were either miniature or proportional, and the U.S. Army Research Lab's blobology concepts. ROTC cade...

Our ability to complete tasks in remote environments has improved with increased sophistication of robotic systems. The quality of remote task performance is driven by the quality of human interaction with robots which can be dependent upon the operator's ability to acquire situation awareness (SA) for task completion. There are, however, often cri...

Overcoming information overload is a central challenge for supporting information dense environments, such as military operations, some process control systems, and real-time data analysis tasks. This paper describes a study which evaluated concepts for supporting military personnel's ability to quickly assess needed information in very cluttered C...

It is widely recognized that Situation Awareness, SA, provides the foundation for decision making and action in numerous domains. As such, this research focused on developing a PC-based tool for training SA in Infantry Platoon Leaders. This Infantry Situation Awareness Training (ISAT) program developed two modules targeted at enhancing SA in Infant...

Situation awareness (SA) is a construct closely linked to decision making and performance. Identifying SA requirements for specific jobs is a necessary first step in accurately assessing SA, developing training programs to enhance SA skills, and evaluating the impact of new technology on SA. This research identified the SA requirements for infantry...

Novel applications of digital technologies promise to revolutionize the battlefield of the Infantry Warfighter by expanding the information available to all echelons through enhanced acquisition, faster access and wider distribution. The integration of this information into a coherent picture is the essence of the Warfighter's Situation Awareness (...

The application of emerging digital technologies promises to revolutionize information acquisition and distribution on the battlefield of the near future. With more rapid information flow, even minimally experienced officers will be pushed to achieve faster decision-action cycles, reducing the time to make and implement decisions. With this advent,...

The military is rapidly importing digital technology into its ground forces. The U.S. Army, for example, is developing the Land Warrior system that will link infantry soldiers and units together via digital communications and imaging. These changes have profound implications concerning how soldiers will move, shoot, and communicate as a team. One r...

This report documents an effort to investigate the situation awareness (SA) requirements for platoon leaders in a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) environment. Subject matter experts with extensive infantry experience participated in a goal-directed task analysis to identify the SA requirements of platoon leaders at three levels: Lev...

The U.S. Army Research Institute is developing models and measures of situation awareness (SA) for infantry operations. Situation awareness requirements will vary with the type of mission, the nature of the enemy, weather, terrain, and a host of other factors. The current research represents the first systematic attempt to determine infantry SA req...

Studies of age differences in face recognition have shown age-related increases in false-alarm errors: elderly persons exceed young adults in judging new faces to be old. To distinguish among theoretical accounts of this finding, we compared young and elderly subjects in two recognition tasks: (1) that of judging whether faces were recent or nonrec...