59685614
Supporting Error-Driven Design
This paper argues that two limitations restrict the utility of interface specification languages. Firstly, they provide no means of capturing the cognitive conditions that lead to operator ‘error’. This makes it difficult to distinguish between the normal behaviour of an expert and the mistakes that often lead to problems for novices. The second weakness is that interface notations cannot easily be used to represent and reason about asynchronous failures. This prevents designers from identifying solutions to failures that could occur at many different points during interaction. These are significant limitations because they reflect a pre-occupation with normative behaviour. Unless we have some means of analysing system failure and operator error then we will continue to have interfaces that are designed to support perfect users in perfect environments.
52833794
The Role of Night Vision Equipment in Military Incidents and Accidents
Night vision devices provide enormous benefits. They enable personnel to carry out operations under conditions that would not otherwise be possible. However, these benefits carry considerable risks. For instance, individuals often become over confident about their ability to use image intensification and infrared devices. In consequence, the use of night vision equipment is an increasingly common factor in military incidents and accidents. This paper uses an analysis of incident and accident data to identify requirements for the successful deployment of night vision equipment. It is argued that these applications must be integrated more closely with existing navigational systems. The successful application of this technology also depends upon adequate risk assessment and team-based training.
846602
Incident and Accident Investigation Techniques to Inform Model-Based Design of Safety-Critical Interactive Systems
The quality of the design of an interactive safety-critical system can be enhanced by embedding data and knowledge from past experiences. Traditionally, this involves applying scenarios, usability analysis, or the use of metrics for risk analysis. In this paper, we present an approach that uses the information from incident investigations to inform the development of safety-cases that can, in turn, be used to inform a formal system model, represented using Petri nets and the ICO formalism. The foundations of the approach are first detailed and then exemplified using a fatal mining accident case study.
47143488
The Evaluation of User Interface Notations
Over the last decade a wide range of graphical, tabular and textual notations have been proposed to support the design of human-computer interfaces. These notations are intended to strip away the clutter of implementation details that frequently obscure interaction properties. Unfortunately, relatively little work has been done to evaluate the usability of these notations for ‘real-world’ interfaces. We have, therefore, conducted an empirical evaluation of the User Action Notation (UAN), State Transition Networks (STN) and temporal logic ‘in the wild’. By this we mean that our subjects were drawn from realistic samples of users and designers. We also presented our subjects with realistic descriptions of two user interfaces. This avoids a weakness of previous investigations that have used ‘toy examples’. The results of our investigation show a strong preference amongst our subjects for the use of natural language descriptions. More surprisingly, our results also suggest a link between the frequency of comprehension errors and positive attitude statements towards particular notations. In other words, our subjects made most errors with the notations that they liked the best. This suggests that while graphical notations, such as state transition networks, have a strong intuitive appeal they may also create significant problems for real-world development tasks.
9129216
A formal and structured approach to the use of task analysis in accident modelling
Recent work (Telford & Johnson, 1996; Johnson, 1997), involving the application of formal notations to analyse accident reports has shown that the quality of these accident reports is poor, so much so that their conclusions can be misleading. The proposed solution has been to use formal notations in combination with traditional analysis to produce a report, the conclusions of which can be verified by formal reasoning. However, there are weaknesses with the formal notations used up until now. Firstly, they have not allowed the representation of all aspects of an accident or incident. For example, human factors have either not been represented or not clearly delineated from system factors. In particular, there has not been an attempt to provide a task analysis of the incident. Secondly, the notations used do not easily facilitate the system engineering concepts of modularity, encapsulation or scalability. In consequence, it is difficult to model different aspects of an accident, compose these different aspects to build up the model or make changes to parts of the model without affecting the rest of the model. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a formal object-oriented specification language can be used to provide the benefits offered by an engineering approach and in particular, by using this approach, how a task analysis model can be constructed. The task analysis incorporates Hollnagel's (1993) classification of erroneous actions, so that scenarios, deriving from human error, can be reasoned about. An air accident investigation report, issued by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, is used as a case study.
15495731
The Team-Based Operation of Safety-Critical Programmable Systems in US Commercial Aviation and the UK Maritime Industries
This paper analyzes a range of incidents involving team-based interaction with safety-critical programmable systems. The incidents were submitted to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and to the UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) between December 2001 and February 2003. Our results show that incidents, which complicated the team-based operation of safety-critical, computer systems in commercial aviation, are now being reported within the UK maritime industry. This reflects the increasing use of programmable navigation and collision avoidance devices both in ferry operations and in commercial fishing. For example, many incidents in both industries now stem from operators making inappropriate assumptions about the likely behavior of co-workers and their programmable systems even though part of their task is to actively monitor those activities. Our results also show that a growing number of incidents are triggered when teams must rapidly reprogram complex, safety-critical systems in response to unpredictable changes in their operational requirements.
7042682
Choosing people: the role of social capital in information seeking behaviour
It is an almost universal finding in studies investigating human information behaviour that people choose other people as their preferred source of information. An explanation for the use of people as information sources is that they are easier to approach than more formal sources and therefore are a least effort option. However there have been few studies that have investigated who the people chosen as information sources are and what their relationship to the information seeker is. This paper reports findings that come out of a larger investigation of the information seeking behaviour of a random sample of residents of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Using the theory of social capital as a conceptual framework and the methods of social network analysis, this study investigated the relational factors associated with the choice of people as information sources. Results indicate that respondents chose people who had better resources than they had and were not well known by them. This suggests that respondents were deliberate in their choice of people information sources and therefore it is speculated that people are not necessarily the least effort option but may require considerable effort to seek out and consult.
29713643
Structural conditions for cycle completable graphs
Abstract We first review the matrix completion problem that motivated cycle completable graphs. We then discuss prior and give new structural characterizations of these graphs, along with their relationship to chordal and series-parallel graphs.
8792186
Artificial Immune Systems and the Grand Challenge for Non-classical Computation
The UK Grand Challenges for Computing Research is an initiative to map out certain key areas that could be used to help drive research over the next 10–15 years. One of the identified Grand Challenges is Non-Classical Computation, which examines many of the fundamental assumptions of Computer Science, and asks what would result if they were systematically broken. In this discussion paper, we explain how the sub-discipline of Artificial Immune Systems sits squarely in the province of this particular Grand Challenge, and we identify certain key questions.
35998651
Artificial Immune System Programming for Symbolic Regression
Artificial Immune Systems are computational algorithms which take their inspiration from the way in which natural immune systems learn to respond to attacks on an organism. This paper discusses how such a system can be used as an alternative to genetic algorithms as a way of exploring program-space in a system similar to genetic programming. Some experimental results are given for a symbolic regression problem. The paper ends with a discussion of future directions for the use of artificial immune systems in program induction.
17446260
Genetic Programming with Fitness Based on Model Checking
Model checking is a way of analysing programs and program-like structures to decide whether they satisfy a list of temporal logic statements describing desired behaviour. In this paper we apply this to the fitness checking stage in an evolution strategy for learning finite state machines. We give experimental results consisting of learning the control program for a vending machine.