D. Colombo's scientific contributions

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 visual aid have been obtained through the analysis of realtime situational awareness queries. Graphical icons expressing multiple attributes are useful in achieving overall situation awareness in most cases. However, there are cases where presentation by a simple text is better in recognition than that by a graphical notation. We discuss the recognition of the ethnic affiliation of crowds as an example at the end..

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 agent decision-space to improve automation transparency and aid the operator's perception of the environment. We describe specific properties of the interface and their anticipated benefits such as improved situation-awareness and expectancy. The visualization is compared with an alternative static representation with an emphasis on how the visualization improves expectancy. An experiment was conducted with a command and control simulation environment to compare the two representations. The results of the experiment have been encouraging. Observed performance improvements in specific scenario conditions, are in accordance to anticipated benefits of the visualization..

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 visual aid have been obtained through the analysis of real-time situational awareness queries. Graphical icons expressing multiple attributes are useful in achieving overall situation awareness in most cases. However, there are cases where presentation by a simple text is better in recognition than that by a graphical notation. We discuss the recognition of the ethnic affiliation of crowds as an example at the end.