"Automation Complacency and the Lumberjack Analogy in Aerospace Systems"

ABSTRACT

His talk addresses the challenges of human interaction with imperfect automation: that which has less than 100% reliability. Such automation can possess a wide range of autonomy and authority relative to the human supervisor. The argument of the Lumberjack Analogy is that the higher the degree of autonomy, the greater benefits when automation performs normally, but the greater the costs in human fault management on the rare occasions when it fails: the higher the tree, the harder it falls, costs that can be mitigated by designing automation transparency. He will describe two human-in-the-loop simulation experiments whose results illustrate this phenomenon: one in the control of a NASA robotic arm, and the other in the air traffic controller’s dependence on an imperfect traffic conflict resolution aid. In the former application he will also present a computational model of human fault management in response to automation failure.

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BIO

Chris Wickens is currently a senior scientist at Alion Science & Technology Corporation in Boulder, where he advises on software modeling of human performance and human-machine interaction. He is also currently a visiting professor of psychology at Colorado State University. In the forty years prior to "retiring" in Colorado in 2005 (intending just to climb mountains), he received his BA in physical sciences from Harvard University (1967), his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974, and served in the US Navy for three years.

He joined the faculty of psychology at University of Illinois in 1974, in 1984 he became Head of the Aviation Human Factors Division, and in 1994 the Associate Director of the University of Illinois Institute of Aviation. He has also served three years as a visiting Professor in the Department of Behavioral Science at the US Air Force Academy. He has written two textbooks on Engineering Psychology and Human Factors, now in their 4th and 2nd editions respectively, and also co-authored two books on Air Traffic Control human factors. He has received the Airbus Award from the Flight Safety Foundation, the FAA's Excellence in Research award, and the Arnold Small Award from the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society. His current research interests are in the applications of attention theory to display design, real world multi-tasking, mental workload assessment and human-automation interaction. Since joining Alion in 2005 he has developed computational models of these processes with special application to aerospace systems.

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