Human System Integration in the DoD: Challenges and Opportunities
Speaker
Greg Zacharias
President and Senior Principal Scientist, Charles River Analytics
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
The ability of humans to cope with information processing demands has become a limiting factor on system performance, especially as systems have become more complex, layered with automation, and fielded in more demanding dynamic environments, all while the roles and responsibilities of the human operator have evolved in the face of greater computational and communications capabilities. The ability to successfully deal with these challenges has important implications not only for individual operator performance, but also for team performance, safety, organizational staffing requirements, and overall human-system effectiveness of large scale systems. This is especially true in the Department of Defense (DoD). To illustrate, we summarize a recent study conducted for the Air Force to assess the state of the art in applying Human Systems Integration (HSI) practices to modern weapons systems design and acquisition, and to recommend improvements in the overall process. We then provide a brief overview of Charles River Analytics (www.cra.com) which has been providing HSI tools and services to the DoD since its inception in the mid-80s, and describe some of our current design projects that attempt to address some of the critical information processing demands facing today’s soldier.
Speaker's Bio
Dr. Greg Zacharias, President and Senior Principal Scientist at Charles River Analytics, guides research in cognitive systems engineering and computational intelligence to support the development of human behavior agents for a broad range of systems applications, as well as the design, implementation, and evaluation of agent-based decision support systems. Before founding Charles River, Dr. Zacharias was a Senior Scientist at BBN Technologies, a Research Engineer at C.S. Draper Labs, and an Air Force attaché for the Space Shuttle program at NASA Johnson Space Center. Dr. Zacharias has been a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Human Factors since 1995, and helped lead a study for the NRC and DMSO evaluating the state-of-the-art in military human behavior models. He is currently chairing a second study for the NRC to develop a DoD S&T roadmap for developing models of human organizations. He has served as a technical reviewer for the Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute (DAGSI), the HFES Ely Award Committee for “best paper”, and the DoD Human Systems (HS) Technology Area Review and Assessment (TARA) Panel. Dr. Zacharias was also a recent member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, serving as peer reviewer for AFRL, member of the Air Combat Command (ACC) Advisory Group, and Chair of the Human System Wing Advisory Group for Brooks AFB. He has also chaired SAB studies in UAV Mission Management, and Human Systems Integration in USAF Acquisition. Dr Zacharias is on the board of the Embry-Riddle Research Advisory Board and the Small Business Technology Coalition.
Speaker's Website
https://www.cra.com/about-us/index.asp
Host
Shelley Evenson