Synthetic Teammates
Speaker
Christopher Myers
Senior Cognitive Scientist & Cognitive Models Core Research Area Lead, Airman Systems, Air Force Research Laboratory
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Video
Video link
Description
The rise in autonomous system research and development combined with the maturation of computational cognitive architectures holds the promise of high-cognitive-fidelity agents capable of operating as team members for training. Such Autonomous Synthetic Teammates (ASTs) have been promised to replace humans in team training situations while maintaining training efficacy. I will present an ACT-R model capable of operating as a team member within a remotely- piloted aircraft system and provide the results from a first-of-its-kind controlled, randomized empirical evaluation in which teams that worked with an AST were compared against all-human teams. The results demonstrate that ASTs can be incorporated into human teams, providing training opportunities when team members are unavailable.
Speaker's Bio
Dr. Myers received his PhD in cognitive science from Rensselaer under the mentorship of Dr. Wayne Gray. Following school, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University with Dr. Nancy Cooke where they collaborated with members of the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a synthetic teammate capable of completing a remotely piloted aerial system reconnaissance task with human team members. Dr. Myers subsequently accepted a position in the Cognitive Science, Models, & Agents Branch of the Airman Systems Directorate in the Air Force Research Laboratory where he continues working toward synthetic teammates and physiocognitive computational process models.
Host
Afsaneh Doryab