Metrorail Crash May Exemplify Automation Paradox
Washington Post (06/29/09) P. A9; Vedantam, Shankar
The fatal collision of two trains on Washington, D.C., Metro's Red Line may come to symbolize the core problem of automation, which is the relationship between humans and their automated control systems. "The better you make the automation, the more difficult it is to guard against these catastrophic failures in the future, because the automation becomes more and more powerful, and you rely on it more and more," says University of Wisconsin at Madison professor John D. Lee. As such systems become more reliable, the greater the likelihood that supervising humans will become less focused, which makes it increasingly probable that unanticipated variables will tangle up the algorithm and lead to disaster. The University of Toronto's Greg Jamieson notes that many automated systems explicitly instruct human operators to disengage, as they are designed to remove human "interference." "The problem is when individuals start to overtrust or over rely or become complacent and put too much emphasis on the automation," he says. Lee, Jamieson, and George Mason University psychologist Raja Parasuraman say there is growing agreement among experts that automated systems should be designed to augment the accuracy and performance of human operators rather than to replace them or make them complacent. A number of studies illustrate that operators can retain their alertness and skills through regular training exercises in which they switch from automated to manual control. Parasuraman has determined that "polite" feedback from a machine can enhance the machine-operator relationship to facilitate measurable safety improvements.
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MIT Professor Creates Software to Organize the Details of Everyday Life
Campus Technology (01/05/09) Schaffhauser, Dian
The computer can be a better tool for creating to-do lists and jotting down other information, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor David Karger. Karger, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, has created List.it, Web-based note-taking software that makes it easier for people to write down short notes and find them later. People ultimately will spend less time entering, storing, and retrieving information, whether email addresses, Web URLs, or shopping lists, using List.it, Karger says. List.it is available on the Firefox browser sidebar. Users can enter information on the fly via the quick input box. A synching feature provides back up for notes, and installing List.it on multiple computers mirrors notes to all of the machines. "I would never make the claim that we're trying to replace Post-its," says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student in Karger's lab. "We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place."
Usability or User Experience--What's the Difference?
E-Consultancy (04/02/08) Stewart, Tom
User experience is often contrasted to usability, with the latter frequently being defined as a system's ease of use while the former is considered a blanket term for the relationship between people and technology, writes Tom Stewart, chair of the ISO subcommittee responsible for the International Standard for Human Centered Design. He says ISO's definition of usability is much closer to the concept of user experience as encompassing issues that include usefulness, desirability, credibility, and accessibility, and the new version of ISO 13407 will employ the term user experience. "In the revised standard we define [user experience] as 'all aspects of the user's experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility' and we point out that 'it is a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behavior, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system," Stewart says. He hopes that incorporating the user experience within the human-centered design process will avoid marginalization and turn user experience into a primary business motivator for a wide array of systems. "Whatever we call it, getting the relationship between people and technology right is critical to a project's success and the intelligent application of a structured, people-centered approach to design can only be a step in the right direction," Stewart says.
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