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CSE in the News

• 06.30.09
  The Washington Post scoops the Cognitive Systems Engineering perspective on the DC Metro crash CSE in the News | (0)

  After the recent DC Metrorail crash, which tragically took 9 lives, the standard flurry of reporting activity followed. Any time an accident like this happens (see the Air France crash before it), all the reporters and amateur investigators try to pinpoint blame – and the easy answer is almost always to identify the culprit as human error at a single point of failure. However, one recent article  looked a little further and began examining the problem from a more powerful point of view – taking the same human-centric approach to systems that we do at RCS. Mr. Vedantam ...
• 01.25.08
  Who pays for insurance with autonomous vehicles? CSE in the News | (0)

  http://www.designnews.com/article/CA6519363.html With the recent completion of the Urban Challenge by several vehicles, GM has decided that it was time to bring the robot-driven vehicle to the public. The goal is to have the self-driven vehicle available for purchase in 2018 – 10 years from now. To demonstrate the ability of autonomous vehicles, GM brought the winner of the Urban Challenge to the recent Computer Electronics Show and allowed attendees to ride along in the vehicle. Showcasing the vehicle's response to "unexpected" events, the GM team placed a few trash cans in the road and drove other vehicles in its path. Having driven ...
• 11.02.07
  Predictions for DARPA’s Grand Challenge CSE in the News | (0)

  On Saturday, November 3rd, DARPA will conduct its third edition of the Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge is a race between autonomous vehicles, which must overcome a number of obstacles in order get to the finish line. This competition is being done in order to accelerate the research in support of the military's desire to have at least 1/3rd of ground vehicles unmanned by the year 2015. While many espouse the practice of using autonomous vehicles, the safety record of autonomous vehicles up to this point has been very poor. They are very brittle, as technology-only systems cannot adapt when situations ...
• 09.24.07
  Cognitive Systems Engineering and the Lunar Station CSE in the News | (0)

    NASA announced plans to construct the Lunar Station for long term exploration of the moon (See the NASA Overview Presentation for an overview of the program, and National Public Radio's report at NPR Report). The Lunar Station will be an extremely large scale, extremely complex environment. It has a massive number of moving parts, and will consist of several self-contained systems, designed vertically, which are to be integrated into one huge system called the Lunar Station - what the systems engineers call "a system of systems". SubSystems will have names like Waste Management/Recycling, Power Management, Oxygen Generation/ReGeneration, Heat Management, and ...
• 09.07.07
  UAV’s don’t *have* to have an 8X accident rate CSE in the News | (0)

    UAV usage has increased dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, for both teleoperated and (psuedo) autonomous UAV's the accident rate remains disproportionately higher than for manned aircraft (reportedly as much as 8X higher). As always, human error is cited as a dominant factor in the accident rate. Typical claims of 'fatigue', 'workload', etc. are the explanations associated with the classic "it was in the manual, in the training, and the data (as determined to be essential by the post-accident investigation) was available in the system, why didnt the pilot react correctly?". See one sample article summarizing this position at: Materials and ...
• 09.07.07
  Factors Behind the Helios Crash Determined CSE in the News | (0)

  "In the Helios case, when the audible cabin altitude alert sounded, the crew thought it was an erroneous configuration warning because the sound is identical, and their subsequent mindset and actions were determined by this preconception until hypoxia overcame them as the aircraft continued to climb." Read the article... Even in highly automated systems, a human operator is always included as part of the system. While automated systems may be capable of doing all the tasks an operator normally handles, they can never run completely by themselves. A system cannot be considered an effective Joint Cognitive System if either the automation ...

recent posts

• Part 4: Final Results-A Case Study in Cognitive Systems Engineering Usability Evaluation
• The Washington Post scoops the Cognitive Systems Engineering perspective on the DC Metro crash
• Part 3: Initial Insights to Customer-A Case Study in Cognitive Systems Engineering Usability Evaluation
• Part 2: Analysis by Inspection-A Case Study in Cognitive Systems Engineering Usability Evaluation
• Part 1: Background-A Case Study in Cognitive Systems Engineering Usability Evaluation
• Cognitive Systems Engineering meets DODAF: Building the Right Thing Well
• Wired Magazine discovers Cognitive Systems Engineering (they just didn’t know it)