Michael Matessa

Collins Aerospace

With the growing capability of autonomy, there is a growing interest in how humans interact with autonomous systems. This paper shows the development of a human-autonomy teaming (HAT) framework as well as general and specific HAT guidelines. Specific guidelines are made for a spacesuit assistant. Guidelines can be used to aid in the development of...

How would we determine the meaning of an interstellar message from a distant civilization? This paper describes algorithms for assigning meaning to symbols found in such a message. It is assumed the message is pre-parsed, resulting in symbols grouped into expressions. Algorithms assign meanings to symbols within an expression and meta-algorithms ma...

How can we determine the meaning of a message from a distant civilization if we don’t have a common language? This paper presents a general technique and principles for decoding interstellar messages: First, find the dimension of the message. Prime numbers may be useful in determining the proportions of messages. Next, find the symbols. This can be...

As aircraft systems become increasingly autonomous, the human-machine role allocation changes and opportunities for new failure modes arise. This necessitates an approach to identify the safety requirements for the increasingly autonomous system (IAS) as well as a framework and techniques to verify and validate that an IAS meets its safety requirem...

A Playbook delegation approach was evaluated for human-autonomy teaming (HAT) in Single Pilot Operations (SPO). In SPO, a single pilot makes flight decisions, performs flight tasks, and collaborates with an autonomous teammate. The autonomous teammate shares responsibility, authority, and tasks. Challenges include the design of functions, interacti...

This paper represents the development and the design of a Playbook interface which supports the coordination between human and autonomous teammates in Single Pilot Operations. The move from Dual-Pilot Operations to Single Pilot Operations necessitates that the autonomous teammate will perform some of the functions which are performed by pilots in D...

Building upon several software tools developed in the last decade for ground-based flight-following operations, a new use for the software is being applied to the cockpit environment of NextGen operations. Supporting automation of several tasks and streamlining information flow to the pilot via a tablet interface, software and datalink capabilities...

This paper describes the use of distributed simulation within and between organizations to investigate Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) with three simulations, showing a progression from integrating automation into a flight following ground station, increased HAT functionality for the ground station, and migration of the autonomy and HAT functionality...

Automation has entered nearly every aspect of our lives, but it often remains hard to understand. Why is this? Automation is often brittle, requiring constant human oversight to assure it operates as intended. This oversight has become harder as automation has become more complicated. To resolve this problem, Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) has been p...

Recent developments in technology have permitted an increased use of autonomy. To work best with humans, autonomy should have the qualities of a good team member. But how can these qualities be measured? One way is to use similar measures to those used to measure good teams with human members. For example, the Non-Technical Skills (NOTECHS) framewo...

From the 1950s through the 1980s, aircraft design was marked by an increase in reliability and automation, and, correspondingly, a decrease in the crew complement required to fly, resulting in the two-pilot operations seen today. However, while technological progress has continued, there have been no further reductions in crew complement, largely b...

The present research examines operational performance and verbal communication in airline flight crews under reduced crew operations (RCO). Eighteen two-pilot crews flew six scenarios under three conditions; one condition involved current-day operations while two involved RCO. In RCO flights, the Captain initially operated the simulated aircraft al...

Autonomous Systems (AS) have been increasingly investigated for safety, aviation , medical, and military applications with different degrees of autonomy. Autonomy involves the implementation of adaptive algorithms (artificial intelligence and/or adaptive control technologies). Advancing autonomy involves transferring more of the decision-making to...

Since the 1950s, the crew required to fly transport category aircraft has been reduced from five to two. NASA is currently exploring the feasibility of a further reduction to one pilot. In this study we examine the effects of separating the pilots on crew interaction. The results are consistent with earlier research on decision-making between remot...

This document describes the second human-in-the-loop study in a series that examines the role of a ground operator in enabling single pilot operations (SPO). The focus of this study was decision-making and communication between a distributed crew (airborne pilot and ground operator). A prototype ground station and tools designed to enhance collabor...

This document describes the second human-in-the-loop study in a series that examines the role of a ground operator in enabling single pilot operations (SPO). The focus of this study was decision-making and communication between a distributed crew (airborne pilot and ground operator). A prototype ground station and tools designed to enhance collabor...

The Graph-Based Interface Language (GRBIL) tool combines aspects of virtual and constructive simulations. GRBIL can be used to set up a virtual simulation where people can interact with a simulation of an operator interface and environment. Human-in-the-loop activity can be recorded when a person performs a procedure with the simulated interface. T...

Altruism has previously been proposed as a topic for interstellar communication, because it begins to describe one important class of human and non-human behaviors, and because it can be modeled in mathematical and physical terms. Prior research has focused on altruism toward close relatives. The current paper explains how we could communicate basi...

The main objective of the Synthetic Teammate project is to develop language and task enabled synthetic agents capable of being integrated into team training simulations. To achieve this goal without detriment in team training, the synthetic agents must be capable of closely matching human behavior. The initial application for the Synthetic Teammate...

This paper presents a representation of training based on an ACT-R model of list learning. The benefit of the list model representation for making training predictions can be seen in the accurate a priori predictions of trials to mastery given the number of task steps. The benefit of using accurate step times can be seen in the even more accurate p...

The low-level cognitive processes involved in autism are not well understood and are a target of ongoing research. This paper proposes that autistic behavior can be modeled as an adaptive response to underconnectivity in certain areas of the brain. In the ACT-R architecture, this is represented by a reduction in source activations between the decla...

ACT-R is a general theory of cognition (Anderson, 1993) which is capable of learning the relative usefulness of alternative rules. Are ACT-R's learning mechanisms suitable for modeling language acquisition? Evidence from a concept formation task analogous to a linguistic role assignment task would suggest so. In this paper, a model developed w...

This paper describes dynamic and spatial reasoning enhancements to the Graph-Based Interface Language tool (GRBIL), which creates ACT-R models by demonstration. A new ability for users to create monitors enables procedures to be dynamically triggered. A new integration of ACT-R with a diagrammatic reasoning theory allows ACT-R to perform spatial re...

The ACT-R cognitive architecture has shown an increasing ability to account for human visual information processing. However, limitations currently exist that can be remedied by the integration of theories of diagrammatic representation. A demonstration of integration of ACT-R with a diagram representation system (DRS) is presented that addresses s...

One way to model human behavior easily and accurately is to decompose a complex task into a set of primitive operations to 'which performance parameters may be assigned. This allows reuse of models at the task level by means of behavioral templates. Performance predictions generated from reusable templates were tested against data from an experimen...

The goal of our research is to easily develop models that predict astronaut performance in space shuttle operations, but it is difficult to make extrapolations from astronaut training data. A solution is to decompose a complex task into a set of basic operators which are sequenced to create longer chains of behavior. In this modeling project, gaze...

A priori prediction of skilled human performance has the potential to be of great practical value but is difficult to carry out. This article reports on an approach that facilitates modeling of human behavior at the level of cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations, following the CPM-GOMS method (John, 1990). CPM-GOMS is a powerful modeling meth...

Performance modeling has been made easier by architectures which package psychological theory for reuse at useful levels of abstraction. CPM-GOMS uses templates of behavior to package at a task level (e.g., mouse move-click, typing) predictions of lower-level cognitive, perceptual, and motor resource use. CPM-GOMS also has a theory for interleaving...

Performance modeling has been made easier by architectures which package psychological theory for reuse at different levels. Both CPM-GOMS, which packages theory at the task level, and ACT-R, which packages theory at the lower level of rules for perceptual-motor interaction, have been shown to be useful. This paper describes ACT-Stitch, a framework...

When people communicate they try to establish mutual knowledge. Garrod and Anderson (1987) proposed that a way to minimize effort during this process would be to follow a "output/input coordination" principle, where output to a partner is formulated according to the same principles of interpretation as those needed to interpret input from a partner...

Adaptive communication has been theorized to be beneficial for the efficiency of tasks involving communication. This paper describes a study where accommodating simulated agents adapted to their human partners' word choice and non-accommodating agents purposely chose different but equivalent words. Both agents adapted to message length, which, alon...

Although acknowledged to be a powerful technique for predicting skilled behavior, CPM-GOMS (John and Kieras, 1996) is not widely used in interactive system design. We hypothesize that this is because creating CPM-GOMS models requires extensive expertise and is tedious and error-prone. To address these problems, we used the Apex architecture (Freed,...

Computational modeling plays a central role in cognitive science. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to computational models of human cognition. It covers major approaches and architectures, both neural network and symbolic; major theoretical issues; and specific computational models of a variety of cognitive processes, ranging from lo...

CPM-GOMS is a modeling method that combines the task decomposition of a GOMS analysis with a model of human resource usage at the level of cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations. CPM-GOMS models have made accurate predictions about skilled user behavior in routine tasks, but developing such models is tedious and error-prone. We describe a proc...

Current computational modeling of human performance can benefit from reusable building blocks of human behavior. Using CPM-GOMS, a cognitively-based task analysis method used in HCI, we have been exploring the concept of reusable templates of common behaviors and their efficacy for generating zero-parameter a priori predictions of complex human beh...

The collaborative nature of communication has been demonstrated by research on the increased efficiency (Hupet & Chantraine, 1992) and the adaptive behavior (Giles, Mulac, Bradac, & Johnson, 1987) of interacting pairs, but these two lines of research have never been explicitly related. This paper reports empirical results showing that adaptively ma...

This book explores a new approach to understanding the human mind - rational analysis - that regards thinking as a facility adapted to the structure of the world. This approach is most closely associated with the work of John R Anderson, who published the original book on rational analysis in 1990. Since then, a great deal of work has been carried...

Click-down (or pull-down) menus have long been a key componentof graphical user interfaces, yet we know surprisingly little abouthow users actually interact with such menus. Nilsens [8] study onmenu selection has led to the development of a number of models ofhow users perform the task [6, 21. However, the validity of thesemodels has not been empir...

This paper describes a preliminary attempt to incorporate theories of communication (Clark & Schaefer, 1989; Poesio & Traum, 1998) into a general cognitive architecture (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) as a first step in creating an interactive problem solving system. A restricted interface for a communicative task is introduced that facilitates system i...

The ACT-R theory (Anderson, 1993; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) is applied to the list memory paradigms of serial recall, recognition memory, free recall, and implicit memory. List memory performance in ACT-R is determined by the level of activation of declarative chunks which encode that items occur in the list. This level of activation is in turn det...

The ACT-R system is a general system for modeling a wide range of higher level cognitive processes. Recently, it has been embellished with a theory of how its higher level processes interact with a visual interface. This includes a theory of how visual attention can move across the screen, encoding information into a form that can be processed by A...

A theory is described that provides a detailed model of how people recall serial lists of items. This theory is based on the Adaptive Character of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) production system (J. R. Anderson, 1993). It assumes that serial lists are represented as hierarchical structures consisting of groups and items within groups. Declarative knowle...

An incremental categorization algorithm is described which, at each step, assigns the next instance to the most probable category. Probabilities are estimated by a Bayesian inference scheme which assumes that instances are partitioned into categories and that within categories features are displayed independently and probabilistically. This algorit...

In this paper we describe the architecture and operation of the MINDS-II system. The system analyzes parsed, recognized speech and tries to detect and correct regions containing misrecognitions. The system uses syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse level analyses to both delimit misrecognized input and hypothesize actual spoken content. The...

This paper describes the structure and operation of SOUL, or Semantically-Oriented Understanding of Language. SOUL is a knowledge intensive reasoning system which is opportunistically used to provide a more thorough, fine grained analysis of an input utterance following its processing by a case-frame speech parser. The SOUL postprocessor relies upo...

This chapter discusses an incremental Bayesian algorithm for categorization. A rational analysis is an attempt to specify a theory of some cognitive domain by specifying the goal of the domain, the statistical structure of the environment in which that goal is being achieved, and the computational constraints under which the system is operating. Th...

A rational analysis tries to predict the behavior of a cognitive system from the assumption it is optimized to the environment. An iterative categorization algorithm has been developed which attempts to get optimal Bayesian estimates of the probabilities that objects will display various features. A prior probability is estimated that an object com...

One way to help to infer intent in collaborative tasks is to impose structure on communication through the use of restricted interfaces. Structured interfaces allow work in areas of interest to this symposium such as intelligent agents that interact with users, task analysis at a team level, and managing dialog. This paper describes structured inte...

Here we report on the development of software agents with human-like performance characteristics for use in simulations of new airspace concepts. The goal of our effort is to use the agents to evaluate the impact of new technologies, such as widespread automation, on the workload and situation awareness of air traffic ontrollers. Our approach combi...

We have previously described a computational approach to modeling human performance, built using the Apex architecture [1],in which extended behavioral sequences are automatically constructed from simpler CPMGOMS templates [2]. Here we report on efforts to extend that method to the more complex domain of air traffic control operations. We describe...