Lunch 'n' Learn Series Presentations

Towards Building an Understanding of Teams
Operating in Complex Environments
C Shawn Burke, Ph.D., IST
Thursday, December 9, 2010
11:30 a.m.– 12:30 p.m.
Partnership II Building, Room 208

Come see an overview of a program of research examining the factors that facilitate team performance in complex environments. While teams are a work form that is employed by the predominant number or organizations in the 21st century, capitalizing on the potential synergy within teams takes concerted effort. Developing teams that contribute to effective performance is not as simple as placing a group of task-experts together, it requires a complex set of antecedents, processes, cognitive, and affective states. In this session, you'll see examples of research that examines how the context within which the team is embedded (e.g., distribution, virtuality, teams-of-teams, cultural diversity) may impact team process, corresponding performance; and the role that team leadership can play in mitigating these decrements such that adaptive team performance is promoted.

Dr. Shawn Burke is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Simulation and Training of the University of Central Florida. Her expertise includes teams and their leadership, team adaptability, team training, measurement, evaluation, and team effectiveness. Dr. Burke has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters related to the above topics. She is currently investigating team adaptability as well as issues related to multi-cultural team performance and multiteam systems. All of the above work is conducted with an interest in team leadership and the training of teams operating in complex environments.

Dr. Burke earned her doctorate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from George Mason University. Dr. Burke serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for Human Factors, Military Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Small Group Research, and Human Resource Management. She has co-edited a book on adaptability and one on advances in team effectiveness research.

An Overview of Research from the Physiological
and Human Factors Team
Thursday, November 18, 2010
11:30 a.m.– 12:30 p.m.
Lauren Reinerman-Jones, Ph.D., IST

The Physiological and Human Factors (PHF) Team of the Applied Cognition and Training in Immersive Virtual Environments (ACTIVE) Lab has been involved in some hot topic research ranging from automation to training transfer to brain-computer interface (BCI) to human-robot interaction (HRI). Each of these research lines will be described in terms of work completed, work in progress, and work planned.

A few key points pertaining to each project is provided in an effort to highlight value of each research line. The PHF team has examined influential components for considering adaptive automation. Factors investigated in experimentation include Situation Awareness (SA), workload, physiological response, and other performance metrics. The goal for this research is determine when to automated, invocation method, and type of task to automate.

Training transfer is investigated for purpose of determining the level of fidelity required for transfer to occur. Another thrust is to verify whether one-to-one mapping of the physical environment or the cognitive state as indexed by physiological response is more important.

A BCI system is in the process of being constructed. The team is only now beginning to realize the potential applications as well as the limitations of BCI. Each project is independent of one another and yet the findings are easily leveraged among them. The contributions to the military range from basic through applied science.

Dr. Lauren Reinerman-Jones started at the University of Cincinnati (U.C.) at age 14, where she earned her doctorate by directing studies for the Army, producing a useful personnel selection tool for vigilance tasks. She was Adjunct Professor at U.C. and contributed to research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Lauren is the HFES Augmented Cognition Technical Group Program Chair. Thus, a current interest involves investigating invocation tools for automated systems with attention to eye tracking, EEG, ECG, and GSR. Other research includes the utilization of physiological measures for assessing training transfer and application to robotics and nuclear regulatory activities. Recently she earned a finalist title for the Orlando "Business Woman of the Year."

 

A proposal for the inclusion of aural skills training in the development of a cardiac auscultation* training tool
Thursday, October 28, 2010
11:30 a.m.– 12:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Phillips, Ph.D. Student

For medical education, simulators have answered the need to provide medical students with practical hands-on training while limiting the cost of errors. This technology is growing with the increased use of patient, surgical, and anesthesia simulators as well as virtual doctor's offices. These simulators play a vital role in providing students with extra opportunities for deliberate practice; which is essential as there is evidence of a recent decline in physical examination skills among medical residents. Although many of these medical simulators have provided students with additional training opportunities within their medical classrooms, these tools are costly and restricted in terms of accessibility. Additionally, it is important to note that examination skills like identifying heart sounds has a primary perceptual component (i.e. perception of rhythm, pitch and intensity), and thus, a medical student's ability to identify heart sounds could potentially be improved with training that specifically targets the development of aural perception skills. Support for the benefits of such training can be found in music education. Specifically, in music education the development of aural perception skills is necessary for music students to correctly identify musical errors and accurately judge when performance deviates from musical notation. In essence, the link between musical students and medical students is the need to correctly make qualitative judgments of aural stimuli against a norm. Thus, integrating tonal, rhythmic, intensity and auscultation training may help provide medical students with the additional practice needed to achieve expert skill levels.

*Listening to internal sounds of the body, usually using a stethoscope.

Elizabeth (Beth) Phillips is a second year student in the Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology PhD program at UCF. She has worked in the Team Performance Lab at IST for the past three years and is currently being advised by Dr. Florian Jentsch. Her research interests include Human Factors and Environmental technologies, musical training, usability and design, and performance with unmanned vehicles. She is also and an avid saxophone player and an active member of the student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

 

 

 

 

Exploring Caracol: Insights from Anthropology & Archaeology
Drs. Arlen & Diane Chase
Institute for Simulation and Training Department of Philosophy
Partnership II – Room 209
October 7, 2010
11:30am to 12:30pm

Drs. Chase & Chase are archaeologists who explore Caracol – come learn about their expeditions and research. Caracol is the largest Maya archaeological site in Belize, Central America. In AD 650, the urban area of Caracol had a radius of approximately 10 kilometers around the site's epicenter. It covered an area much larger than present day Belize City (the largest metropolitan area in the country of Belize) and supported more than twice the modern city's population. Urban Caracol maintained a population of over 140,000 people through the creation of an immense agricultural field system and through elaborate city planning. Caracol is noted not only for its size during the Maya Classic era (A.D. 250-950), but also for its prowess in war; this includes an AD 562 defeat of Tikal (Guatemala) and a subsequent conquest of Naranjo (Guatemala) in AD 631 (see timeline at www.caracol.org).

Arlen F. Chase (Ph.D. 1983, University of Pennsylvania) is a Pegasus professor and the chair of anthropology at the University of Central Florida. His research interests focus on archaeological method and theory in the Maya area with particular emphasis on contextual, settlement, and ceramic analysis and secondary interests on urbanism, ethnicity, and epigraphic interpretation. For more than a quarter century, he has co-directed excavations at Caracol, Belize; before that he worked on a seven-year project at Santa Rita Corozal in the same country. He has authored over 100 articles and book chapters as well as The Lowland Maya Postclassic (1985; edited with P.M. Rice), Investigations at the Classic Maya City of Caracol, Belize (1987, with D.Z. Chase), A Postclassic Perspective (1988; with D.Z. Chase), Mesoamerican Elites: An Archaeological Assessment (1992; 1994; edited with D.Z. Chase), and Studies in the Archaeology of Caracol, Belize (1994; with D.Z. Chase).

Diane Z. Chase (Ph.D. 1982, University of Pennsylvania) is a Pegasus professor and the Executive Vice Provost of Academic Affairs at the University of Central Florida. Her primary focus of research is on the ancient Maya of Central America. Her research interests focus on archaeological method and theory in the Maya area with particular emphasis on complex societies and hermeneutics, ethnohistory, and osteological and mortuary analysis. For more than a quarter century, she has co-directed excavations at Caracol, Belize; before that she directed a seven-year project at Santa Rita Corozal in the same country. She has authored over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as Investigations at the Classic Maya City of Caracol, Belize (1987, with A.F. Chase), A Postclassic Perspective (1988; with A.F. Chase), Mesoamerican Elites: An Archaeological Assessment (1992; 1994; edited with A.F. Chase), and Studies in the Archaeology of Caracol, Belize (1994; with A.F. Chase). Currently, she is working on a book with A.F. Chase entitled Maya Archaeology: Reconstructing an Ancient Civilization.

 

Border Hunter: Training for Cognitive Decision Making
Friday, May 14, 2010
11:30 a.m.– 12:30 p.m.
Denise Nicholson, Ph.D., Sae Schatz, Ph.D., & Eric Ortiz, M.A.

The highly successful Combat Hunter Program was first developed in 2007 at the bequest of USMC General James N. Mattis. Its purpose was to make Marines more efficient “hunters” by training enhanced observation skills, combat profiling, and combat tracking; a human-centric training approach to sense for danger. Currently, this program is only available in the Marine Corps.

However, this April, Joint Task Force North (JTF-N) arranged for a special 20-day “Border Hunter” course to be delivered at Fort Bliss. Forty-three students (from the Army, Border Patrol, and other Law Enforcement Agencies) attended the course. Drs. Nicholson and Schatz, along with their colleague Eric Ortiz will discuss their experience as participant observers and discuss some of their insights about ways to measure the effectiveness of the course to train for cognitive decision making (sensing for danger).

Speakers’ Bios
Dr. Nicholson is the Director of the Applied Cognition and Training in Immersive Virtual Environments Laboratory at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training (IST). She holds joint affiliations at UCF’s Modeling and Simulation Graduate Program, Industrial Engineering and Management Department and College of Optics and Photonics/CREOL. She has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona, a B.S. in Electrical Computer Engineering from Clarkson University and is a Certified Modeling and Simulation Professional (CMSP). Her research includes Virtual Environments for Training and Education, Computer simulation for Human – Agent Collaboration, and Adaptive Human Systems Technologies for DOD sponsors i.e. ONR, DARPA, Army RDECOM, and ARL.

 

 

Dr. Schatz is a Research Associate with the ACTIVE laboratory at the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Simulation and Training. The ACTIVE lab, directed by Dr. Denise Nicholson, engages in applied research and development for the analysis and improvement of human performance. Among its many other activities, the lab develops validated simulation-based training systems for Defense Agencies, including the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. Dr. Schatz’s work comprises applied research efforts in simulation environments, including the investigation of intelligent and adaptive training systems and the development of training architectures in support of the lab’s military training efforts.

 

 

Eric Ortiz became a member of the ACTIVE Lab in 2008 following eight years of service with General Dynamics Information Technology. He has over thirteen years experience in 3D computer animations and simulation, creation of virtual environments, flash web development, and multimedia design. In addition to digital media, he has successfully managed teams of web developers, graphic artists, and programmers in various capacities in multiple locations. The primary areas of focus throughout Eric’s career have been in IT infrastructure/configuration management, along with graphical process design, development, and implementation.

 

C3Fire: A Research and Training Simulation Environment Supporting Measurements of Team Work in Command and Control
Rego Granlund, Santa Anna IT Research Institut - Linköping University Sweden
Helena Granlund, Swedish Defence Research Agency
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
2:00 PM
Room 211 - Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Parkway

In this colloquium, we will describe the C3Fire research and training environment and give examples on research projects performed with the environment (www.c3fire.org). C3Fire is a computer-based simulation environment that is used in research and to train coordination and collaborative work in command and control situations.

The environment creates a situation where a group (from 3 to 12 persons) can experience different types of common problems in basic teamwork and command and control. The task domain in C3Fire is forest fire fighting, an analogue domain chosen because it creates a representative collaborative task environment for real-world cognition. The tasks generated in the environment are complex, dynamic and have opaque characteristics, similar to the cognitive tasks that people normally encounter in real-life C2 systems.

Over the past decade C3Fire has analyzed a variety of collaborative work processes with recent studies including exploration of cultural differences in team collaboration; the impact of geographical information systems in municipality crisis management and measuring situation awareness through automated communication analysis. One of the most important features in the environment is that the system monitors player activities and their interactions with all simulation tools (e.g., computer-mediated activities, communication, individual work). C3Fire analytical tools include the ability to asses performance, communication, coordination and responsibility distribution at both the person level and group level.

 Speaker Bios

1. Rego Granlund, Ph.D., is a researcher at Santa Anna IT Research Institut, Linköping University Sweden. His research interests include monitoring team work in command and control settings, computer-based simulation and team work training environments. He has been working with the C3Fire research and training environment since 1994. He received his Ph.D. at Linköping University in 2002.
2. Helena Granlund is a researcher at Swedish Defence Research Agency. Her research interests include monitoring team work in command and control settings and pedagogical aspects of team work training. She has been working with the C3Fire research and training environment since 1997.

Simulation and Robotics Efforts for Human Robot Interaction (HRI) Research and Student Education
Daniel Barber, M.S., Institute for Simulation & Training
Friday, April 30, 2010
11:30 a.m.– 12:30 p.m.
Partnership II, Room 211, 3100 Technology Blvd.

Daniel Barber presents an overview of recent software and tools development in the ACTIVE Lab's robotics and simulation projects. Over the past few years our team has produced several Open Source software libraries and applications to support experiments in Human Robot Interaction. In this session, you’ll see specific examples of our simulations (e.g. Mixed Initiative Experimental (MIX) Testbed) and robotic platforms (e.g. Segway Robotic Mobile Platform, Remote Weapon System) and how they’ve been incorporated across our research efforts.

You’ll also have an opportunity to learn how to integrate your own robotics efforts with ours using standards for communication with Unmanned Systems. Finally, you will also get a chance to learn more about our educational efforts through the Robotics Club at UCF, hearing about the different competitions they go to. We’ll describe the challenges these students have faced, how they’ve addressed them, and what they’ve learned in the process.

Daniel Barber, M.S., is a Research Associate at IST.
He leverages his background in computer science and modeling and simulation as a member of the Applied Cognition and Training in Immersive Virtual Environments (ACTIVE) Lab.

Daniel Barber also has more than five years of experience in the field of robotics, with research in intelligent systems, machine learning, human-agent collaboration, control systems, path-planning, computer vision, communication frameworks, and environment modeling. He has designed multiple autonomous systems and is a mentor and faculty advisor for the Robotics Club at the University of Central Florida, which has won the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition multiple times.

His current research focus is Human Robot Interaction, Live Virtual and Constructive simulations involving mixed-initiative teams, Brain Computer Interfaces, and hybrid machine learning models for human, social, cultural, and behavior modeling.

A Vision for the Science of Imagination
Jim Davies, Ph.D., Assistant Prof. Cognitive Science
Carleton University Science of Imagination Laboratory
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
2:30 p.m.
Partnership II, Room 209, 3200 Technology Pkwy

Imagination is a crucial process for hypothetical thinking, planning, dreaming, counterfactual thinking, and creativity. In this talk Dr. Davies will present how imagination can be studied scientifically, and the various endeavors he currently pursues in the Science of Imagination Laboratory.

Dr. Jim Davies approaches cognitive science through artificial intelligence, creating computer models of visualization. His goal is to create a computer program that imagines visual scenes the same way people do, with the same content in the same places. See www.jimdavies.org for more information about this speaker and his imaginitive work.

The seminar and other related activitives are co-sponsored by Simiosys Real World Laboratory for Experiential Media and the Cognitive Sciences Student Association @ UCF.

The talk will be followed by a panel discussion with UCF Faculty and Researchers. At 5:00 pm  Dr. Davies will be on campus conducting an informal presentation and discussion with the Cognitive Science Student Association on pursuing imaginative research in Cognitive Science. For information on the colloquium and panel discussion, contact Christopher Stapleton (simiosys@me.com). Contact CSSA President Heather Lum (h.lum.ucf@gmail.com) for information on CSSA sessions.

This seminar was made possible, in part, by a generous donation by Simiosys Real World Laboratory for Experiential Media

 

 

Mobile, Simulation and More: Overview of the METIL
Lab Projects
David Metcalf, Ph.D., Institute for Simulation & Training
Jan. 29, 2010
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Partnership II, Room 209, 3100 Technology Pkwy

As the world of online technologies evolves a host of new tools can promote play, learning and collaboration. In this overview of mobile, game/sim and Web 2.0 projects you will see examples of mobile, games and simulations that build on Web 2.0 technologies for education, healthcare business, government and social causes. Examples from DoD, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and others will be shared.

Dr. David Metcalf is a senior researcher at IST. His lab explores leading edge innovations in learning. Specific areas of focus include learning business strategy, performance measurement, operational excellence, outsourcing, blended learning, games/sims and mobile learning.

Dr. Metcalf formerly was the Chief Learning Technologist at RWD Technologies. He joined RWD with the sale of his NASA Kennedy Space Center laboratory spin-off company, Merrimac. Prior to spin-off, he was the Lead Multimedia Designer at NASA KSC.

 

A Content Meta-analytic Study of Technology Use in Computer
Support for Collaborative Learning
Dr. Heisawn Jeong, Department. of Psychology
Hallym University, Gangwon-do, South Korea
Thursday, Jan 21, 2010, 11:00 a.m.
Room 211, Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy

This study examined technology use in Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL). A content meta-analysis of empirical CSCL research was carried out to address three research questions: (1) What kinds of technologies are being used in CSCL research, (2) What kinds of collaboration are supported, and (3) What are the contexts of technology supports (e.g., learning domains, educational levels, and pedagogical approaches)? Empirical CSCL studies were selected from seven leading journals of the field. Analyses of a random sample of these studies showed that CSCL applications typically embedded more than one technology in their environments with the most common technology being communication technology, with distributed collaboration support being more frequently face-to-face collaborative support CSCL applications. Analyses also showed that CSCL was carried out across a range of disciplines in a variety of pedagogical contexts. Based on the analyses, five different types of technological supports for collaborative learning are proposed.

Dr. Heisawn Jeong is an Associate Professor and former Chair in the Department of Psychology at Hallym University in South Korea. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in Cognitive Psychology and has had post-doctoral appointments at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan. She has also received a Visiting Scholar appointment with the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. 

Dr. Jeong's research focuses on knowledge co-construction, learning with technology, metacognition, scientific reasoning, and cognitive aging. She has received funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, the Korean Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology.

 For more information or to meet with Dr. Jeong, please contact Dr. Stephen M. Fiore

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Understanding the Facilitators and Barriers to Knowledge Creation: A Study
of Interdisciplinary Teams in a Medical Context
Maritza R. Salazar, Ph.D., Institute for Simulation & Training
Thursday, Dec 10, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 209
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

National funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, suggest that some of the greatest breakthroughs in biomedical research will come from interdisciplinary research which seeks to solve complex problems at the nexus between diverse disciplines (NIH Roadmap, 2004; National Academies Press, 2004).  To gain a competitive advantage, management of medical research and clinical organizations seek to enhance their knowledge production outputs by promoting interdisciplinary team structures.   In this presentation, I will share findings from my dissertation research.  The first study identifies the factors that may influence a knowledge worker's decision to participate in interdisciplinary, cross-departmental research endeavors in a large, metropolitan medical center where cross-boundary collaboration has tended to be uncommon and counter-normative.   In addition, I will present a study that extends research that has discussed the value of team heterogeneity for knowledge creation in teams (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998), to empirically test this relationship in a field study.   This research investigates whether knowledge stock heterogeneity – the conceptualization of knowledge diversity as a complex constellation of members' knowledge garnered from work-based experience (e.g., disciplinary, training, and area of practice diversity) – predicts innovativeness in interdisciplinary science teams.   Together, the findings from this dissertation elucidate the barriers and facilitators to participation and innovation in interdisciplinary medical research and clinical teams.

MARITZA R. SALAZAR, Ph.D., is post doctoral research associate at UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training. She earned her Ph.D. degree (2009) in Management & Organizations from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of learning processes, team processes, and organizational theory with an emphasis on complex, knowledge-intensive organizations.  Her specific interests center on collaboration processes and outcomes in knowledge-diverse teams that facilitate and inhibit creativity and innovation.  She utilizes a multi-method approach that combines deductive, quantitative and inductive, grounded theory approaches to investigate under-explored research questions related to creativity and innovation.

 

Use Your Illusion? Investigation of a Perceptual Training Method for Pilots in a Visual Approach Task
Michael T. Curtis, M.A., Institute for Simulation & Training/UCF Department of Psychology
Thursday, Nov 12, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 209
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

The approach and landing phase of flight is widely recognized as one of the most difficult phases of flight for a pilot or air crew. More specifically, training professionals in the aviation industry have repeatedly reported difficulty in training inexperienced pilots on execution of the visual approach flight maneuver. In line with these reports, a research program at IST's Team Performance Laboratory has targeted the development and testing of supplemental training protocols to improve pilot performance in a visual approach task.

The focus of this presentation will be on the development and testing of a Discrimination Training Module (DTM) designed to improve pilot perception of critical cues that occur during a visual approach. With this in mind the discussion will center on the theoretical basis for this novel training methodology, presentation of findings from initial research, discussion of ongoing research, and a look to future research on this topic.

Michael Curtis received his B.A. in psychology in 2001 and a post-baccalaureate certificate in human technology interaction in 2004 from the University of Kentucky. Mike also received a M.A. in human factors psychology from the University of Central Florida (UCF) in 2008, where he is currently a doctoral candidate in the Applied Experimental Human Factors Ph.D. program. Mike has worked on a range of human factors topics spanning from product design to robotics. His main focus lies, however, in the aviation domain. Working as a senior research associate at the Team Performance Laboratory (TPL) with Dr. Florian Jentsch, his research mainly entails topics involving cockpit and crew team behavior, pilot training, and pilot performance measurement.

 

Mixed Reality: Basic Research and Applications at the Media Convergence Laboratory
Charlie Hughes and Eileen Smith, Institute for Simulation & Training
Thursday, Oct 29, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 209
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

Mixed Reality (MR), the blending of real and virtual worlds, is central to most of the projects and basic research taking place at MCL. Charlie will give an introduction to the topic, discussing the continuum from the virtual to the real that is the domain of MR.

He will give examples of projects taking place across this continuum, emphasizing the technologies and basic research that support these applications.

Specifically, he will describe projects that address performance assessment/improvement including situational awareness and physical/cognitive rehabilitation.

Eileen will then discuss the lab's activities in experiential learning. Specifically, she will describe a project in which we developing kiosks for the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale, and our work in teacher assessment and preparation..

Applying the Science of Teams to Inform Policy and Research on Team Science
Stephen Fiore, PhD, Institute for Simulation & Training
Thursday, Oct 3, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 209
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

Science has long recognized the difficulty associated with interdisciplinary research – yet we continually struggle with overcoming the challenges arising from interdisciplinary interaction. In this presentation I discuss interdisciplinary research in the context of team science and how to develop a complementary basic and applied research agenda supporting a broad swath of group and team researchers. Comparisons between interdisciplinary research and other forms of cross-disciplinary research are made along with a brief discussion of the development of this concept. The primary argument is that interdisciplinary research is essentially team research, that is, research conducted by a team. I show how it may be possible to consider the implementation of principles from teamwork and team training to improve interdisciplinary research and the practice of team science.

 

Does Size Matter?  Investigating the Utility of 1:35 Scale Models for Training Military Vehicle Recognition
Joseph Keebler, Ph.D., Institute for Simulation & Training
Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Room 208
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

This presentation will discuss a series of studies conducted as part of a collaboration between IST's Team Performance Laboratory and ACTIVE Lab. The research involved investigation of the perceptual processes involved in target recognition to improve training and minimize fratricide. The overall goal was to examine the viability of 1:35 scale models as training aids to facilitate detection of friend/foe targets. Via a multi-disciplinary approach, the research examined training outcomes when scaled models are compared to other methods of military training, including military issued graphic training aids and vehicles taken from a Deployable Virtual Environment. An overview will be presented of findings from a series of five studies, across both laboratory and virtual environment contexts, along with Functional Near-Infrared Imaging data which examined neural correlates of military vehicle identification in the parietal lobe.

Joseph Keebler is pursuing his Ph.D. in Human Factors Psychology at UCF, working under the direction of Dr. Florian Jentsch. His main areas of research include cognition, perception and expertise, specifically as they apply to object recognition, and human robot teaming. He has published on the topic of cognition in combat and presented on fratricide and combat misidentification. Recently he has been investigating the utility of Functional Near Infrared Technology as a means to better understand learning and training.

Unmanned Air Vehicles in US Airspace
Randall Shumaker, Ph.D., Institute for Simulation & Training
Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Partnership II Building, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando

In recent years there have been major advances in many aspects of technology to build a variety of unmanned vehicles.   While most are remotely operated, there has also been significant success in creating vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation in complex environments.  

But these technical developments have created a huge demand by government, industry, and academic sectors to operate unmanned air vehicles within the US airspace for applications ranging from long-range transportation of cargo, pipeline and power line inspection, research of many kinds, to hobbyists.   As such, there is a high probability that unmanned aircraft will be operating over our heads within the next few years. 

In this talk Dr. Shumaker discusses these developments as they relate to taking this major step in unmanned vehicle deployment. He outlines some of UCF's current research and development in unmanned vehicles and provide background information on how air operations work in the US.  He also includes discussion of the regulatory and operational implications of research in this area – which has, heretofore, focused on operations in highly controlled situations and for special purposes.  

If you are interested in research opportunities in this domain, or even curious about the implications of an unmanned FEDEX cargo aircraft landing on the runway after your USAIR flight touches down, or the potential issues associated with small unmanned (up to 45 KG) aircraft operating over your house,  you should attend this talk.

Randall Shumaker, Ph.D. directs the operations of the Institute for Simulation & Training. Previously Superintendent, Information Technology Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, he brings considerable expertise in human-machine interface and artificial intelligence to the institute and UCF.

His personal research interests include artificial intelligence, biomorphic computing methods, and advanced techniques for software development. As a former Presidential rank Senior Executive, US Voting Member in the NATO IST Panel, and frequent reviewer and advisor for military research programs, he has significant insight into military and high consequence civilian applications of technology. He has had significant success in transitioning research from academia into government and industry.

Shumaker is the author of more than fifty scientific publications and is a frequent speaker on a variety of technical topics. He has served as a reviewer for several professional publications and for federal agencies including DARPA, DDR&E, ONR, NASA, and ARL. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, is a Professional Engineer, and a Commercial Pilot, SEL, MEL, IA.

Vision of the Centers
Dr. Glenn Boreman
Trustee Chair Professor in the UCF College of Optics and Photonics
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
11:00 a.m.
Nanoscience Center, 12424 Research Parkway, Suite 435
45-minute presentation followed by 15 minute of discussion

Glenn Boreman received the B.S. degree in optics from the University of Rochester and the Ph.D. in optical sciences from the University of Arizona. He joined the UCF faculty in 1984 as an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering. He is currently Trustee Chair Professor in the College of Optics & Photonics, with doctoral-student supervision privileges also in Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Materials Science. He has supervised 17 doctoral students to completion at UCF. His research concentrates on the development of high-frequency electromagnetic sensing devices using direct-write electron beam lithography. He is coauthor of Infrared Detectors and Systems (Wiley), author of Basic Electro-Optics for Electrical Engineers (SPIE Press) and Modulation Transfer Function in Optical and Electro-Optical Systems (SPIE Press). Prof. Boreman served 6 years as Editor-in-Chief of Applied Optics; and is a senior member of IEEE, a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and a fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

Cognitive Simulation: The Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP)
Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Stephen Beale
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Bruce Jarrell, George Fantry
University of Maryland School of Medicine

Monday, March 16, 2009
11:30 a.m.
A 45-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of discussion

The Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) is an electronic environment designed for trainees to rehearse and perfect the mental aspects of medical decision-making. This simulated environment aims to recreate the real life medical situation that is among our most effective learning situations; direct patient care in a teaching hospital or clinic. In this situation, a trainee communicates with a patient, interprets test results and images, establishes a diagnosis, develops a plan with the patient, performs interventions and observes responses to treatments, all while under the supervision of a clinician-teacher. Throughout the process, sophisticated language-based exchanges occur between the patient, teacher and trainee. Both the patient-trainee interaction, as well as the teacher-trainee interaction, stimulate the trainee to define problems, synthesize solutions and recognize personal knowledge shortcomings. These cognitive and metacognitive processes result in highly educational experiences.

Overview of MVP:
In order to create a simulation environment that enables these processes, two essential design requirements are needed: the creation of electronic patients; and an electronic forum for communicative exchanges in English to occur between patient and trainee. Both requirements are functional in the MVP.

To create electronic patients, the MVP environment processes encoded deep medical knowledge using artificial intelligence software in a multi-agent network to generate Virtual Patients (VPs) as instances. These VP instances demonstrate realistic physiological and medical findings that evolve over time in an automatic way. The VPs also react appropriately to trainee chosen medical interventions, whether correct or incorrect. The combination of the depth and complexity of the VP along with the trainee's actions results in a dynamic, open-ended process where many VP outcomes are possible.

To create an electronic forum for a two-way conversation between VP and trainee, the MVP environment uses natural language processing technology to assign meaning to trainee input. Once the input is interpreted, the VP formulates a response, also in natural language, to return to the trainee. This response is electronically generated through intelligent reasoning that considers the trainee input request, MVP deep medical knowledge, VP physiological traits, and VP intellectual traits and social values.

A third design component of the MVP is to enable a two-way conversation between a trainee and an electronic teacher. Although not as well developed as the VP discussed above, the intelligent virtual teacher in the MVP is capable of evaluating the trainee's performance real-time and providing selected feedback and suggestions, also in natural language. This capability will become more developed as additional knowledge is added to the system.

Technical Accomplishments in the MVP:
MVP technical elements are in various stages of refinement and include:

• A knowledge repository containing medical and pedagogical information which is amenable to machine reasoning
• Software capable of reasoning with the knowledge, interpreting trainee language input to the VP and generating VP language output to the trainee
• A knowledge-based model of the human body in health and disease, and the software to use the model to create a VP and have it function autonomously, over time and in response to trainee interventions
• A similar model of human intellectual traits and social values that are important in health maintenance, disease development and disease management, and that are chosen because they are educationally important for a trainee to learn and manage
• Medical knowledge-based and pedagogically-based models of an intelligent virtual teacher
• Software capable of enabling a conversation-based interaction between the trainee, the virtual patient and the virtual teacher using human language

Currently, we have VPs suffering from nine complex esophageal diseases that progress over time. They behave in a clinically appropriate fashion and possess a complexity that challenges clinical skills at the level of a senior GI fellow. Other possible conditions including TBI and PTSD are being considered for additional development.
 

Research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Randall Hill, Jr., PhD, Executive Director
Friday, January 30, 2009
11:00 a.m.
A 45-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of discussion

The University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies is revolutionizing learning through the development of interactive digital media.

Collaborating with entertainment industry neighbors, ICT produces virtual humans, computer training simulations and immersive experiences for decision-making, cultural awareness, leadership and health.

Randall (Randy) Hill, Jr., Executive Director, graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1978 and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence.

Dr. Hill joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1984. There he became a technical group supervisor and the work area manager for network automation in NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) Advanced Technology Program. While at JPL, he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1987 and 1993, respectively. His doctoral thesis showed how intelligent tutoring systems can be used in interactive simulations to assist students in learning how to operate complex equipment.

Dr. Hill joined the USC Information Sciences Institute in 1995, where he worked with Paul Rosenbloom, Milind Tambe and Jonathan Gratch on the development of models of human behavior and decision-making for real-time simulation environments. He joined the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in June 2000 as a Senior Scientist and was involved with research on virtual humans and immersive learning environments. In December 2004, Dr. Hill became Director of Applied Research and Transition. In this position, one of his greatest accomplishments was forging stronger ties between entertainment industry and technology developers to create engaging immersive learning environments. Most notably, he led the Army Excellence in Leadership (AXL) and Enhanced Learning Environments with Creative Technologies (ELECT) projects at the Institute. In October of 2006, Dr. Hill was named the Executive Director of the ICT.

Dr. Hill is a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and he has served on the Program Committees for the Eighteenth Conference on Innovative Applications for Artificial Intelligence (June 2006, Boston, MA), the Fifteenth Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (May 2006, Baltimore, MD), and the Sixth International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents hosted by the ICT (August 2006, Marina Del Rey, CA). Dr. Hill has over fifty technical publications, including a co-authored article, "Toward Virtual Humans" featured in AI Magazine in Summer 2006.

 

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Past Medin Series Presentations(2008)
Lunch 'n' Learn Series, 2007 lectures 2006 lectures 2005 lectures 2004 lectures

Functional Imaging with NIRS: Its Technology and Applications
Dr. Randall Barbour
NIRx Medical Technologies
Monday, Sept. 15, 2008
12:00 p.m.
Room 112, Partnership II Building
3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL 32826

Since its original adaptation as a tomographic imaging modality by Barbour in 1988, NIRS imaging is increasingly recognized as a powerful tool to explore the wealth of information that can be harnessed from measures of the dynamics of the hemoglobin signal. Recent advances in instrumentation design and related capabilities have rendered the technology operational under a wide range of conditions that are generally unsuitable to alternative technologies. These capabilities have enabled access to critical elements of tissue function in ways that significantly enhance the information value of the NIRS signal. Discussed will be an overview of latest developments in system capabilities and examples of applications in the field of neuroscience and other investigative areas.

While formally trained as a biochemist, over the past twenty years, Dr. Barbour has focused on technology and application development in field of biomedical optics. Dr. Barbour was the first to describe the methods of Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) (1988) and the related area of Fluorescence Diffusion Tomography (1995), both of which are now widely practiced world-wide. In 1999, Dr. Barbour extended DOT capabilities to provide for the capture of a continuous time series of imaging data. The latter methodology is currently the leading approach to biomedical optical studies of large tissue structures. Dr. Barbour holds a professional license in laboratory medicine, has published more than 175 peer review and conference papers, has seventeen patents issued or under review, and has been continuously funded from NIH since 1993. Dr. Barbour also serves as CEO of Photon Migration Technologies, a federally funded R&D company and CEO, of NIRx Medical Technologies, a world leader in the development of DOT imaging systems. Dr. Barbour serves as a reviewer for NIH and other federal granting agencies and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Naval S&T Strategic Plan on Naval Warrior Performance and Protection
RADM William E. Landay
Chief of Naval Research
Friday, May 2, 2008
1:00 p.m.
Room 208, Partnership II Building
3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL 32826

In this talk CNR RADM Landay will discuss the Naval Warrior Performance and Protection focus area from the Naval S&T Strategic Plan.

Rear Admiral Bill Landay was commissioned as a Surface Warfare Officer in May 1978. His numerous sea tours include Gunnery Assistant and Combat Information Center Officer in USS Hepburn (FF 1055); Ship Control Officer in USS Nicholas (FFG 47); Commanding Officer of USS Aquila (PHM 4); and Commanding Officer of USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60).

Ashore, he has served as C4I Program Officer at the United States Transportation Command; Executive Assistant to the Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command; Deputy for Fleet and Lifetime Support in the Program Executive Office, Theater Surface Combatants; and Executive Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development, and Acquisition); His Flag assignments have included Program Executive Officer for Littoral and Mine Warfare; and, currently, the 21st Chief of Naval Research, where he also serves as the Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps for Science and Technology and Director, Test and Evaluation and Technology Requirements.

Rear Admiral Landay holds a Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering from the United States Naval Academy and a Master of Science in Systems Technology (C4I) from the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a graduate of the Program for Management Development at the Harvard Business School and a certified Acquisition Professional.

Quality Assurance of Simulation Models and Applications
Prof. Axel Lehmann, Universität der Bundeswehr
Institut für Technische Informatik
Monday, April 7, 2008
11:00 a.m.
Room 209, Partnership II Building
3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL 32826

This presentation will summarize some major results of research studies Dr. Lehmann has been involved with over the past couple of years for the German Armed Forces. The talk will focus on the importance of considering model design, development, and application as a multi-phase engineering process where each phase results in an intermediate product, its documentation and a report on tests, and verification & validation results. By means of concrete examples, the presentation will demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of such a generic model engineering approach.

Axel Lehmann, PhD Full Professor with a Chair in Modeling and Simulation at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany (Federal Armed Forces University) for nearly 20 years. In addition, he is currently Executive Director of another non-for-profit Institute (ITIS) at the university, which focuses its research and projects on M&S, as well. The major areas of current projects and of research concerns are:

• parallel and distributed M&S
• verification & validation of M&S
• component-based model design
• model management systems
• intelligent, ontology-based decision support
   

Operational Adaptation: Impact of Cognitive Sciences for the Naval Warfighter
Ivy Estabrooke, PhD
Office of Naval Research Global
Monday, Jan. 14, 2008
2:00 p.m.
Partnership II Building

The Office of Naval Research is responsible for fostering, planning, facilitate and transitioning scientific research to enable future naval power and the preservation of national security. The Naval S&T Strategic plan recognizes the potential impact of the cognitive sciences in the Warfighter Performance and Protection and Distributed Operations focus areas.

Leveraging the past “Decade of the Mind,” the cognitive sciences are poised to enhance future naval capabilities, protecting and treating sailors and marines and optimizing training and selection of the future force. The strategy highlights the need for improving training, enhancing assimilation of new cultures and environments and improving small group performance.

The new concept of Operational Adaptation, being able to adapt to the operational environment faster than the enemy, will require new avenues of research in the cognitive, social and cultural sciences. In this presentation we will discuss new program areas including advancing methods for training and selection for rapid cultural assimilation and adversarial psychology.

Ivy V. Estabrooke, PhD is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the Office of Naval Research Global where she fosters collaboration with international scientists in Naval-relevant fields with a focus on Naval Warfighter Performance. She is currently collaborating with the Expeditionary and Manuever Warfare division of the Office of Naval Research to integrate the cognitive, social and cultural sciences to support Marine Corps and Navy Warfighter performance. Ivy earned her PhD in neuroscience from Georgetown University in 2005 for work examining sex differences and hormone influences on language production and memory systems. She also has extensive experience with neuroimaging and pharmacological intervention studies. Ivy’s scientific interests span the fields of neuroscience, cognition, psychology and linguistics.

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Past Medin Series Presentations (2007)
Lunch 'n' Learn Series, 2008 lectures 2006 lectures 2005 lectures 2004 lectures

Designing Scalable and Adaptive Heterogeneous Multiagent Teams
Dr. R. Paul Wiegand, ITT Industries Advanced Engineering and Sciences

Friday, Feb. 16, 2007
11:00 a.m.
Room 208, Partnership II bldg, 3100 Technology Pky
Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

Dr. Wiegand will present an extension to an existing artificial physics based representation for control behaviors of multiple interacting agents. The extension allows for natural incorporation of heterogeneous member behaviors in the team, and it is particularly well-suited for situations where team behaviors are based on geometric formations (e.g., rings and lattices). This representation allows for a great deal of flexibility and adaptability in terms of the makeup of the team. In addition, he will discuss a principled method for constructing modular and scalable heterogeneous team behaviors that allows an engineer to incorporate domain knowledge during design. Solutions to variants of a resource protection problem will be demonstrated. Finally, he will discuss how these ideas were applied to this problem in the context of physical robotic platforms, paying particular attention to the robotic team's ability to gracefully adapt to changes in team capabilities.

Dr. R. Paul Wiegand works for ITT Industries Advanced Engineering & Sciences and conducts research at the Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, part of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. His work at NRL began with a postdoctoral fellowship provided by the American Society for Engineering Education after receiving his Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2004. Dr. Wiegand's general research interests are in the areas of theory of coevolutionary computation, multiagent systems, and application of coevolution for multiagent learning. He helped organize the coevolution workshop at the 2002 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference and served as an invited researcher at Dortmund University as part of the Collaborative Research Center‚ Computational Intelligence‚ (SFB 531) in 2003. He has also served as co-moderator of EC-Digest, a research-oriented email list that serves the evolutionary computation community; and as a member of the IEEE Task Force on Coevolution.

Social-Network and Simulation Views of Effective Teamwork
Alex Yahja, Ph.D.
Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007
1:30 p.m.
3280 Progress Dr, Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

Real world events are often unpredictable and chaotic, and thus challenging. In particular, combat environments are especially challenging for teamwork. It is crucial to be able to adapt to real world events, and the most adaptive component in the human-robot teamwork systems is the human one. Dr. Yahja will talk about how humans establish and dissolve communication and social networks from the social-network’s point of view.

He will explore a case of robot teamwork architectures built from a computer science point of view. Then he will describe a potential avenue to make teamwork more effective based on the lessons gathered from both social-network and robotic/computer science teamwork research. The social-network’s view includes the consideration of organizations, a formal form of social-networks. Additionally, he will explore another view for teamwork: the simulation’s point of view. While simulation is not often thought of as an essential part of teamwork, he will show that it should be. He will also touch briefly on cyberinfrastructure.

Alex Yahja received the Ph.D. degree in computation, organizations and society from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in September 2006. He received two M.Sc. degrees, one in robotics and one in engineering and public policy, from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 and 2004 respectively.

He is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. In his current work, he is doing research into social peer-to-peer disaster response systems and collaborative recommender systems for the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) group at NCSA. In his graduate years, did research in mobile robotic systems, policy analysis, computational social and organizational science, and modeling and simulation. His dissertation deals with how to automate the validation and model-improvement of simulations. A new conceptualization is developed and the resulting tool is applied to agent-based simulations of disease spread and in social-network workers-management simulations of impeding strikes.

His research interests span modeling and simulation, model validation and improvement, machine learning, hypothesis formation and testing, social networks, collaboration/teamwork and recommender systems, robotics, computational management and organization science, knowledge-based systems, policy analysis, cyberinfrastructure, and artificial intelligence.
 

Military Troops and Disabled Veterans:
Using Intelligent Agents to Cope with Complex, Time Sensitive Information
Wayne Shebilske Ph.D.
Friday, Jan. 26, 2007
2:00 p.m.
3280 Progress Dr, Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

Dr. Shebilske is applying his research into training and intelligent displays to learning with disabilities. His key insight is that disabilities slow and distort perceptions and/or responses to increase time sensitivity and information processing complexity. His motivation for this extension comes from a needs analysis he did of disabled students at Wright State University and related needs of thousands of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are surviving severe blasts because of (a) body armor that protects vital organs and (b) prompt, effective care in the field. The Veterans Administration is responding by treating and rehabilitating this new generation of disabled veterans, whose injuries include multiple amputations, low vision, hearing loss, spinal cord injuries, and other neurological losses. He thinks Human Factors and IO psychologists can play an important role in responding to these needs.

Dr. Shebilske's current research also includes Benchmarked Experiential Systems for Training (BEST) and Intelligent Icons for Meta-information Adaptive Presentation (I2MAP). He is applying this research to Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) teams and Dynamic Targeting Cell (DTC) teams of the Air and Space Operations Center and is observing simulated missions of these Air Force command and control tasks in which information is overwhelmingly time sensitive and complex. He combines training and intelligent displays to help troops cope with the time sensitivity and complexity. Both interventions employ mathematical benchmarking of near-optimal performance.

Dr. Shebilske received his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1974. After nine years on the faculty of the University of Virginia Psychology Department (Assistant Professor, 1974-1979: Associate Professor 1979-1983), Dr. Shebilske served as Study Director for the Committee on Vision at the National Academy of Sciences (1983-1985). Dr. Shebilske was a professor at Texas A&M University (1985-1998) where he was the Graduate Program Advisor (1993-1998). He conducted research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Brooks Air Force Base and Lackland Air Force Base. He spent the summer of 1985 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany. In 1992, he was awarded a National Research Council Senior Research Associateship at the Armstrong Laboratory Intelligent Training Branch. He conducted research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Brooks Air Force Base and Lackland Air Force Base. He spent the fall of 1998 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. He has worked closely with government, military, and private agencies identifying critical issues for study in many areas including design and development of aerospace systems, visual display equipment, medical devices, standards for pilots and drivers, automated instruction for complex skills, and virtual reality systems.


Emerging Semantic Web Trends:
Transparent and Trustworthy Applications and Semantically-Enabled
Scientific Data Integration
Deborah McGuinness, Ph.D.
Friday, Jan. 12, 2007
11:00 a.m.
Partnership II bldg., 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

As web applications proliferate, more users (both people and agents) find themselves faced with decisions about when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information obtained from arbitrary applications, users need to understand how the information was obtained and what it depended upon.

Particularly in web applications that may use question answering systems that may be heuristic or incomplete or data that is either of unknown origin or may be out of date, it becomes more important to have information about how answers were obtained. Emerging web systems will return answers augmented with Meta information about how answers were obtained. In this talk, Deborah McGuinness will describe an approach that can improve trust in answers generated from web applications by making the answer process more transparent.

The added information is aimed to provide users (humans or agents) with answers to questions of trust, reliability, recency, and applicability. The talk will include descriptions of a few representative applications using this approach explaining cognitive assistants that learn and intelligence analyst tools.

The talk will also briefly highlight work on semantically-enabling access to and integration of scientific data. Examples will be taken from Deborah’s work on the NSF-funded Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory and the NASA-funded Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration projects.

Dr. McGuinness is the acting director and senior research scientist at the Knowledge Systems, (KSL) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. She is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 20 years. Most recently, Deborah is best known for her leadership role in semantic web research, and for her work on explanation, trust, and applications of semantic web technology, particularly for scientific applications.

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Past Medin Series Presentations (2006)
Lunch 'n' Learn Series, 2008 lectures 2007 lectures 2005 lectures 2004 lectures

Smaller, Faster & Immersive: New Directions for Virtual Environment Design
Larry Davis, Ph.D.
Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006
Room 112, Partnership II building
3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

The increased computational power of microprocessors has enabled fantastic miniaturization of devices and unprecedented functionality. From cellular phones, to the iPod, to the Blackberry and to personal DVD players, devices are smaller, faster and deliver an ever-increasing amount of features. Moreover, these features are often complementary, e.g., a cellular phone that plays music files.

With the integration of these devices into everyday life, the commercial success or failure of a device is often linked to the transparency of its user interface. By transparency, we mean the level at which using a device is comfortable, natural, socially appropriate, and/or intuitive.

Unfortunately, virtual environments are typically not very transparent. However, by taking advantage of the trend toward smaller devices with complementary features and advanced sensing, we can begin to increase the transparency of virtual environments. These increasingly transparent systems will have direct aid in visualization, training, and augmented cognition.

Dr. Davis will summarize his research accomplishments and how they have shaped his thinking regarding interfaces. He will share his insights into miniaturization and its pertinence to virtual environments, and discuss research directions that may be pursued to increase virtual environment transparency.

Larry Davis is currently a Senior Instructional Assistant at Valencia Community College and a Co-Founder of Tirrion Technologies, a start-up company in the University of Central Florida Technology Incubator. His research interests are in the area of virtual environments and his work spans a range of topics, including the optimization of tracking scenarios, the creation of novel virtual environments, and the implementation of user assessment tools. He has authored or co-authored more than thirty research papers and presentations on these topics.

Dr. Davis received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2004. He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and has participated in research programs with Sandia National Laboratories. He serves on the editorial board of the FEF Journal of Interdisciplinary Research.

Redirected Walking in Virtual Environments
Sharif Razzaque
Wednesday, Feb 15, 2006
10:00 a.m.
IST Conference Room, Partnership II building
3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL (Central Florida Research Park)

There are many different techniques for allowing users to specify locomotion in human-scale immersive virtual environments (VEs). These include flying with a hand-controller, using a treadmill, walking-in-place, and others. Real walking, where the user actually and physically walks in the lab, and virtually moves the same distance and in the same direction in the virtual scene, is better than flying. It is more input-natural, does not require learning a new interface, results in a greater sense of presence, and theoretically results in less simulator sickness.

One serious problem with real walking, however, is that the size of the virtual scene is limited by the size of tracked area. For example, for an architect to really walk in a virtual prototype of a house, the tracked area must be as large as the house. This requirement makes real walking infeasible for many facilities and virtual scenes.

To address this limitation, Dr. Razzaque has developed Redirected Walking, which by interactively and imperceptibly rotating the virtual scene around the user makes the user turn her/himself. Under the right conditions, Redirected Walking would cause the user to unknowingly walk in circles in the lab, while thinking he/she is walking in a straight and infinitely long path in the virtual scene.

Dr. Razzaque will discuss Redirected Walking’s theoretical and physiological underpinnings, and show that it can be used:
1) To make the user turn themselves
2) Without causing the user to be aware of Redirection
3) Without unacceptably increasing the user’s level of simulator sickness and, most importantly,
4) To useful effect:

· In head-mounted display (HMD) systems, the user can experience a virtual scene larger than the lab while also having the benefits of real walking.

· In an open-backed, three-walled CAVE, users can have the increased presence and input-naturalness normally associated with a fully enclosed CAVE.

Ideas for VE training scenarios that address several limitations of current HMD VE systems, such as field-of-view and latency will also be discussed.

Sharif Razzaque has just earned a PhD in Computer Science from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under Fred Brooks. His interests are human computer interaction, virtual environments, and building real, deployable, systems. He has previously worked on physiological assessment of presence, collaborative satellite-engineering tools at Lockheed Martin, and cochlear implants at the University of Michigan.

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Past Medin Series Presentations (2005)
Lunch 'n' Learn Series, 2008 lectures 2007 lectures 2006 lectures 2004 lectures

The Team Performance Lab: R&D for training and evaluating
real-life skills in high-consequence applications
Dr. Florian Jentsch
May 3, 2005
11:30 a.m.
IST Classrooms, 3280 Progress Drive

Dr. Jentsch will discuss the Team Performance Laboratory at UCF which he directs. Performance is critical in complex and dynamic environments where teams are required to adapt to uncertain information and where the cost of team error is high. The Team Performance Lab studies ways to use modeling and simulation not only to provide safe and cost-effective training solutions, but also to ensure the possibility of tracking, measuring and critiquing the effect of training on individuals and teams.

Florian Jentsch, Ph.D., is an associate scientist/scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of Central Florida. He is also the current director of the Team Performance Laboratory, a position he took over in the Fall of 2003 after he had been Assistant and Associate Director of the Lab since 1997 and 2001, respectively.

Dr. Jentsch received his Ph.D. in human factors psychology from the University of Central Florida in 1997. He also holds master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering from the Technical University of Berlin (summa cum laude) and in aeronautical science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His doctoral dissertation on training for junior commercial flight crew members won the American Psychological Association’s 1998 George E. Briggs Award for the best dissertation in applied/experimental psychology, and he was also awarded the American Psychological Association’s 2002 Earl Alluisi award for Early Career Achievement in applied/experimental psychology.

Dr. Jentsch’s interests center on research and development that supports the training and evaluation of complex knowledges and skills, especially in high-consequence environments. Application areas for his research have been in team training, human-robot-interaction, aviation human factors, cross-cultural research, research methodology, and simulation where he has co-authored over 150 publications, presentations, and technical reports. He has received grants and contracts from the U.S. Army (ARL-HRED, ARO, PEO-STRI, and RDECOM-STTC), the U.S. Navy (NAWC-TSD, NAVAIR Orlando), several units within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). He also has consulted on system and software development projects for various federal and state government sponsors, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, DoT-FAA, DoT-TSI. NASA, and Workforce Central Florida (WCF).

What's Wrong with Virtual?
The Whereabouts of Marketing Virtual Reality Value
Dr. Patrick Corsi Feb. 24, 2005
11:00 a.m.
IST Classroom C

Are we yet “on the threshold of the Age of Magic” (Fruchterman, 1992)?

From the past hype of the early nineties, Virtual Reality fell well under the past years promises. While the potential remains intact, a deep transition is going on mostly underpinned by such notions as presence and engagement. This necessarily calls for revisiting the demerits of VR.

Do we yet know how can VR make our economy more competitive?
VR equipment is still expensive if not encumbering, hardly real-time and not so immersive; user training and side-effects restraint the use to e.g. entertainment. A shared perception of a relatively immature technology hasn’t much disappeared. Can VR functional added-value be deployed then in e.g. health care, industrial maintenance and distance operations? How? That is the marketer’s address here…

But wait! There is more: VR is a key enabler that impacts design methods and models, products life-cycles, distance operations…

Specific benefits include the virtual as a training paradigm substituting to the real; in a nutshell, VR is to be positively found at the core of the accelerated timings of tomorrow’s innovations. The virtual paradigm re-positions users within new business models that may capture the value of tomorrow markets…
This talk explains how to relinquish the intractable of VR and the difficulties inherent to VR weaknesses. Can we then hopefully delineate the modalities for mass field adoption so virtual comes of age for… real?

Patrick Corsi first worked for IBM (San Jose Research Lab; La Gaude telecommunications plant); then THOMSON-CSF (directing AI group), grew a start-up in artificial intelligence over the 80’s in Paris; worked at the European Commission in Brussels in charge of monitoring the European AI portfolio of projects over the nineties. He is now an international consultant in innovation engineering - KINNSYS, Brussels; an Associate Professor at ISTIA Innovation, University of Angers and Laval on VR entrepreneurship and an Executive Advisor to the European Multimedia Forum. He can be reached at patrick.corsi@skynet.be.

Teamwork in the Control of Unmanned Vehicles: Challenges, Progress, and Lessons Learned
Thursday, February 3, 2005
11:00 AM
IST's Classrooms
3280 Progess Drive
45 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of discussion.

During 2001-2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a program on “mixed initiative control” of teams of unmanned robotic vehicles.  This presentation will discuss the goals of the program, the cognitive engineering challenges associated with mixed initiative control of teams of unmanned vehicles, the progress that was made in developing human control concepts and some of the lessons learned from the effort that can inform future research.

Jean MacMillan is the Chief Scientist at Aptima. Jean holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University, an M.C.P. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Antioch College. Her 20-year research career has spanned a broad range of topics in human-machine interaction and user-centered system design, including adaptive instructional design, team decision-making, command center design, and human performance measurement in simulation environments.

At Aptima, Jean has served as the Principal Investigator for projects focusing on the development of reliable and valid performance measures for teams of F-16 pilots training in a distributed simulation facility, the design of synthetic entities that function as team members for simulation-based training of teamwork skills, the assessment of team performance and development of team performance measures for AWACS Weapons Director teams, and the development of optimized model-based manning reduction strategies that will allow the operation of Navy ships with a reduced number of personnel. Jean is also co-designing a computer-based adaptive tutor for improving the reading comprehension of adult readers.

Jean is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and the Cognitive Science Society. She was one of the founding members of the Cognitive Engineering and Decision-Making Technical Group within HFES. Jean serves on the Editorial Board of the Human Factors journal.

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Past Medin Series Presentations (2004)
Lunch 'n' Learn Series, 2008 lectures 2007 lectures 2006 lectures 2005 lectures

Virtual Reality Assets for Assessment, Therapy and Rehabilitation
Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Ph.D.
Institute for Creative Technologies and The School of Gerontology
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. arizzo@usc.edu
Nov. 30, 2004
1:00 p.m.
IST Classrooms

Virtual Reality (VR) has now emerged as a promising tool in many domains of assessment, therapy and rehabilitation (Rizzo, Schultheis, Kerns & Mateer, 2004; Weiss & Jessel, 1998; Zimand, Anderson, Gershon, Graap, Hodges, & Rothbaum, 2002; Glantz, Rizzo & Graap, 2003). Continuing advances in VR technology along with concomitant system cost reductions have supported the development of more usable, useful, and accessible VR systems that can uniquely target a wide range of physical, psychological, and cognitive rehabilitation concerns and research questions. What makes VR application development in the therapy and rehabilitation sciences so distinctively important is that it represents more than a simple linear extension of existing computer technology for human use. VR offers the potential to create systematic human testing, training and treatment environments that allow for the precise control of complex dynamic 3D stimulus presentations, within which sophisticated interaction, behavioral tracking and performance recording is possible. Much like an aircraft simulator serves to test and train piloting ability, virtual environments can be developed to present simulations designed to assess and rehabilitate human functional performance under a range of stimulus conditions that are not easily deliverable and controllable in the real world. When combining such assets within the context of relevant, ecologically enhanced Virtual Environments, a fundamental advancement could emerge in how human performance can be addressed in many rehabilitation disciplines. This talk will provide a brief introduction to VR and describe the assets that are available with VR applications in assessment, therapy and rehabilitation. Within that context, examples of virtual environments that illustrate each asset will be presented. The value of a multidisciplinary approach for the design and implementation of VR will be emphasized with examples spanning the fields of rehabilitation, psychology, neuroscience, physical therapy, occupational therapy, special education and social work.

IHMC - A Habitat for Innovation
Kenneth M. Ford
June 9, 2004
11 a.m.
IST Classrooms
45 minute lecture followed by 15 minutes of discussion

Kenneth Ford will survey the activities at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), established in the early '90s as a research unit of the University of West Florida. At its inception, IHMC consisted of two part-time employees and occupied one small room. In its first decade, IHMC has grown into one of the nation's premier IT-related research institutes with over 115 researchers and staff. Researchers at IHMC pioneer ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities.

Our human-centered approach results in systems that can be regarded as cognitive prostheses, much as eyeglasses are a sort of ocular prosthesis. Our systems fit the human and machine components together in ways that exploit their respective strengths and mitigate their respective weaknesses. The design and fit of computational prostheses require a broader interdisciplinary range than is typically found in one organization, and IHMC staff includes computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers and social scientists of various stripes, as well as some people who resist all attempts to classify them. Innovation is place-based.

IHMC's presence in the heart of historic downtown Pensacola allows continuous interactions and frequent collisions of people and ideas. This stimulating, human-scale urban environment is rapidly becoming a habitat for innovation. IHMC currently occupies 32,000-sq. ft. of space in two buildings renovated building in the historic district. In addition, IHMC has recently opened an office in Silicon Valley.

See http://www.ihmc.us/index.php and http://www.uwf.edu/uwfMain/

Kenneth Ford is Founder and Director of the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC). Ford's research interests include: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, human-centered computing, and entrepreneurship in government and academia. Ford is the author of over a hundred scientific papers and five books. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tulane University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI/MIT Press and has been the editor of several journals. Dr. Ford is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

In January 1997, Dr. Ford was asked by NASA to develop and direct its new Center of Excellence in Information Technology at the Ames Research Center. He served as Associate Center Director and Director of NASA's Center of Excellence in Information Technology. Dr. Ford was awarded the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 1999. Dr. Ford serves on numerous charitable, government, and corporate boards. In October of 2002, President George W. Bush nominated Dr. Ford to serve on the National Science Board. His nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March of 2003.

Evolution of the Standard Simulation Architecture
Jeffery S. Steinman, RAM Laboratories
May 10, 2004
11:00 a.m.
IST's Classroom C
A 45 minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of discussion.

This seminar provides an overview of the proposed Standard Simulation Architecture (SSA) that addresses interoperability between (1) simulations in a federated environment, (2) entities within a simulation potentially executing in a parallel and/or distributed environment, and (3) components residing within entities. These three categories of composability have different peer-to-peer interoperability overheads that must be addressed specifically. The SSA defines a highly flexible infrastructure to map federates, entities, and components to hardware systems. The proposed Standard Simulation Architecture is defined in abstract layers of functionality with well-defined interfaces to promote technology infusion from R&D organizations such as universities, government laboratories, and industry. This seminar will provide an overview of these layers and their supported composable modeling approach.

Dr. Jeffrey S. Steinman received his Ph.D. in High Energy Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988. He has been involved in numerous parallel and distributed simulation programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Metron Inc, and RAM Laboratories. As the principle developer of the Synchronous Parallel Environment for Emulation and Discrete Event Simulation (SPEEDES) framework, Dr. Steinman has provided technical oversight on a number of very large DoD simulation programs including: JSIMS, MDWAR, EADTB, JMASS, HPC-RTI, JSAF, and others. This work resulted in five patents and more than 40 technical papers in the area of parallel discrete event simulation. Dr. Steinman is currently serving as Vice President and Chief Science & Research Officer with RAM Laboratories, Inc.

Human Language Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory
Elaine Marsh
January 29, 2004
10:00 AM
IST's Classrooms.
A 45 minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of discussion.

The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI) has been involved in both basic and applied research in artificial intelligence since its inception in 1982. The research program of the center is directed toward understanding the design and operation of computer systems capable of improved performance based on experience; efficient and effective interaction with other systems and with humans; sensor-based control of autonomous activity; and the integration of varieties of reasoning as necessary to support complex decision-making. The emphasis at NCARAI is the linkage of theory and application in demonstration projects that use a full spectrum of artificial intelligence techniques.

The center's Multi-Modal Multi-Media Systems section performs exploratory research in the area of man-machine interactions, specifically natural language and multi-modal interfaces, natural language and speech system evaluation, and textual knowledge management. This talk will present an overview of the various research projects developing natural language man-machine communication capabilities. (See http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil)

Elaine Marsh is section head and group leader for the Multi-Modal Multi-Media Systems section in the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she has been employed since February 1983.

She has conducted basic and exploratory research in the areas of interactive systems, specifically natural language and multi-modal interfaces, natural language and speech system evaluation, and textual knowledge management.

Prior to joining the Naval Research Laboratory, she was employed as a research scientist on the
Linguistic String Project at New York University. Her current research interests include discourse analysis in natural language, human-machine interfaces, speech for virtual worlds, knowledge representation for narrative texts, and human-language system evaluation.

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IST Research Grant Series Lectures

The Simulation Dependence Graph
Keith Garfield
Tuesday, March 14, 2004
1:00 p.m.
IST Progress Drive building

The Simulation Dependence Graph (SDG), is a novel graphical representation of simulation systems. It was developed at IST by adapting the Program Dependence Graph (PDG) to the simulation domain. The PDG, and the related Java System Dependence Graph (JSDG), is a popular program representation used in computer science and software engineering that allows sophisticated program analysis. The SDG variation of the PDG captures critical dependences among simulation attributes to allow analysis of the computations comprising the simulation and their relationships to one another. Based on the success and widespread use of the PDG, development of the SDG will provide a powerful analytical tool to the Modeling and Simulation Community at large.

SDG is composed of a node set and three edge sets. The node set represents attributes of the real world entities being simulated, their allowable value ranges, and the functions that update the attribute values during the course of a simulation. The three edge sets represent data dependences, entity memberships, and sequencing constraints. The data dependence edges explicitly model input-output interactions between attributes; this information can be used to analyze and optimize system behavior in the same manner that modern optimizing compilers perform program data-flow analysis. The entity membership edges explicitly associate attributes belonging to the same physical entity; this information can be used to distribute entity-dependent behaviors and constraint across a set of nodes representing a single simulated object. The sequencing constraint edges explicitly represent the order in which attribute values are updated; these edges may be used to demonstrate the efficiency of one manner of scheduling tasks over another. The sequencing edges may model uni-processor or parallel processor environments.

The advantages of representing simulations in this format are many. Graphs are well-known and understood mathematical structures that have been proven to be useful in a many problem domains. More specifically, PDG’s have been shown valuable in the areas of automated program optimization and performance enhancement. Program analysis techniques developed using the PDG may be leveraged to allow static and dynamic analyses of simulation systems. Candidate problems are listed below:

• Syntactic composability can be determined from the graph structure.
• Semantic composability may be approximated by extending PDG analysis techniques such as “program slicing” to the SDG.
• Improvements to event scheduling may be attained by adapting optimizing techniques used in compilers. These techniques involve specialized analysis such as “program slicing” to identify past computations affecting a current computation.