It is with gratitude that I welcome you to Greenbelt, MD for the 9th Symposium on Human Interaction with Complex Systems (HICS) and the 3rd Topical Workshop on Sensemaking. This year’s theme is “Understanding Complexity in the Age of Information Technology Work Systems” This theme is appropriate given the growing concern about human roles in the future work systems,  which are almost entirely governed by laws of information technology. These work systems are characterized as being time-critical, dynamic, and complex. The information streams are a mixture of human and technology driven sensors. Thus, not only are the sources of information diverse, distributed, and possibly conflicting, but also the acquired information is very likely noisy, dynamic, incomplete, and uncertain. The key human endeavor then involves not only identifying valuable information in a timely fashion, sharing this information across agencies in an efficient manner, but also integrating volumes of disparate information to support strategic decision making.

Related to these information issues, sensemaking has recently emerged as the cognitive filter that can delimit some of the information clouds. Sensemaking is the ability to mine or excavate information in context, mentally integrate information, and discover relationships during the process. As simple as it may sound, the modus operandi of achieving the tasks of sensemaking are by themselves complex since the human mind and its tacit knowledge cannot deal with all the nuances of ecological niches and organizational factors without cognitive cost. This year’s symposium provides a renewed interest in addressing both the cognitive and neuroscience issues of sensemaking in an information technology driven workplace with its dynamic and complex characteristics. The selected papers in five tracks have attempted to present the synoptic views from the system design and modeling perspectives. Most importantly, the selected plenary speakers, with a wealth of experience in battle command systems, cognitive neuroscience, and human-robot interaction, bring more divergent views that finally converge on the issue of human dimensions-supporting the human to make sense of the task environments by using human characteristics to drive system design.

On a more knowledge intensive level, two panels are organized using subject matter experts. Panel I is on Battle Command Essential Capabilities which showcase talents from Battle Command Battle Laboratory-Leavenworth and expert support casts from Army Research Laboratory (ARL). Panel II is on Cognitive Neuroscience of Sensemaking with experts from industry and all three-tier USA services participating by invitation. By mapping the battle command essential capabilities such as technology and command leadership to the capacities of individual and group cognition and neural information processing, the obvious is expected to emerge-the insight into how human dimensions and the warfighter capability outcomes will drive the future of battlefield performance-especially in austere and asymmetric environments.

We hope you will continue to be a part of our scholarly activities. Feel free to send us your comments and suggest topics for 2010 HICS by email at humansys@ncat.edu. My special gratitude to all the members of the international technical committee, the local planning committee, the Chair of the program committee, supports from Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Leavenworth, Army Research Office, the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and North Carolina A&T State University; and many others whom I have no space to mention. Enjoy the conference.

Celestine A. Ntuen, Ph.D

Distinguished University Professor & Director

USA Army Center for Human-Centric Command & Control Decision Making

Center for Human-Machine Studies

North Carolina A&T State University

Greensboro, NC 27411, USA

Track Description

Track 1 | Human Factors

Human Factors is a discipline that deals with design of systems for, and with, the human mind. In the age of information work systems, the demand for human factors explanation to human performance remains elusive. One reason for this is the shift in demand of human resources to more cognitive tasks and pervasive use of human memory when interacting with technology systems. This track was specifically designed to introduce REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) students to research methods in modern human factors. Papers presented in this tract deal with neuroergonomics, attention, multimodal conflicts, and errors in human-machine systems.

Track 2 | Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction provides the global lens of understanding the age of information work systems. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a study, a model, and/or a paradigm used to describe how humans interact/interface with technology. While HCI is a matured discipline, the pervasive and ubiquitous design of HCI has generated interest in the social dimension issues of trust and quantifying human performance while interacting with HCI to perform some domain specific tasks. This track has papers to provide answers to the elusive problems addressed in every aspect of system design and analysis by researchers and practitioners.

Track 3 | Automation and Decision Aids

Different people look at the future of information technology work systems in two generic and primarily viewpoints-automation and aiding. The automation group believes that technology tends to believe that computer agents should have their “mind” and hence think autonomously in their task domain-that is, without human intervention. The autopilot in the airplane has consistently been used to illustrate this-without mentioning the black box control models driving such systems-a pure chance error minimization black box with fixed behaviors.  On the other hand, the decision aiding champions see agents and other decision support systems as associates but with human supervision-in terms of verification and authorization. In both schools of thought, it has noted unequivocally that information display and visualization will remain paramount to how humans and technology interact and co-exist-the so called joint-cognitive system. This track has papers that attempt to answer some of the design questions.

Track 4 | Complex Systems

The last time I saw an increase in papers on complex system was in 1994 HICS. Interestingly, the thematic knowledge then, as it is now, has not changed. The shift in discourse has however changed along the trajectory of dynamic information systems and the properties of information equivocality arising from multiple source generator, different scales of presentation, and the need to fuse information to provide the decision maker with a common metric for courses of action. There is also a broader interest to address systems in terms of multi-tier hierarchy or distributive interactions using models of complex adaptive systems and the most recent interests in system of systems (SoS) representation. Beginning to differ from over a decade ago, the modeling approaches have paid more attention to cognitive (human) dimensions as inseparable factors in complex systems. About nine papers will express their perspectives in dealing with complex systems.

Track 5 | Applied Sensemaking

As the information technology driven workplace grows, the “cloud” of information will provide the obscurances and hence constraints to how the human operator processes information. Inevitably sensemaking has recently been recognized as the cognitive filter than can delimit some of the clouds. Sensemaking is the ability to mine or excavate information in context, mentally integrate information, and discover relationships during the process. In applied context, human operators will need more training to make sense of an information context. This will include analytical tools to help in real-time inference tasks such as pattern matching, discovering latent and/or missing evidence, determining near optimal levels for seeking further information in order to make decision. The presentations in this track attempt to provide the answers to these knowledge gaps.

Student paper competition

The HICS organizing committee is sponsoring a REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) technical paper competition. Six of the REUs at the Center for Human Machine Studies are sponsored by grants from Army Research Office (ARO) and the National Science Foundation through the Engineering Research Center for Power Fluids at the University of Minnesota. Varieties of research topics are experienced by the REU students. Some examples are investigating effect of stress on assembly line workers using neuroergonomics indicators, using a driving simulator to study effects of divided attention and intersection crossing by drivers, and multimodal control interface of robot excavators in construction industries. All REU participants will present their papers during the 2009 HICS Symposium. The winner will take home a plaque and a cash prize of $150. The winner will be announced during the Award Banquet on Thursday, August 20, 2009.