Framework of Trust and Reliance in Automation

As part of my Ph.D. candidacy I was required to take an Advanced Examination where each student receives individual questions based on his or her intended dissertation topic.  The questions are intended to motivate the student to learn about areas that his or her advisers feel are gaps in the student’s understanding of the problem domain or dissertation method.  The questions are very theoretical and typically require (very long) written responses based on extensive literature reviews to formulate logical responses.

For my A-Exam, I received 5 questions (some with multiple parts) and was required to respond to them in a 2 week period (pretty standard for my department/major combination).  At the time of my A-Exam my intended focus was on dynamic trust in automated systems so one of my questions was to characterize the effects that real-world dynamics are likely to have on human trust and reliance in automated systems.  Luckily, I bounded this discussion within the domains of intelligence analysis as it served as  perfect test bed for both my intended dissertation focus and for highlighting the factors that influence trust and reliance.

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Incorporating situationally qualified human observations into a fusion process for intelligence analysis

Since my second year at UB my research assistantship has been funded by a 3 year multi-university research initiative (MURI) grant focused on network based hard/soft information fusion.  The first year of this research (for me at least) was focused on learning about how accurate people are at observing different phenomena in the world given specific contextual factors.  For example, how accurately can people judge distances?  What if it’s nighttime?  What if it’s snowing? etc.

This work was developed to allow human observations to be appropriately characterized in terms of their error/bias so that they could be integrated into a data fusion process along with hard data (which comes from things like radar sensors that are highly calibrated).  The poster below, which was created for a UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences poster competition, describes the results of these research efforts at a high level.