Nadine Sarter
Professor
Industrial and Operations Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Robotics
Director, Center for Ergonomics

The introduction of high levels of automation and autonomy into the aviation industry has helped improve the precision and efficiency of operations. At the same time, it has created challenges for flight crews and resulted in incidents and accidents due to breakdowns in pilot-automation interaction. These breakdowns highlight the need to better support trust calibration and system transparency. Trust (the attitude that an agent will help achieve an individual’s goals in a situation characterized by uncertainty and vulnerability; Lee and See, 2004) is a critical intervening factor affecting automation usage. Misuse happens when pilots trust an automated system too much and over rely on the automation. Disuse happens when pilots lack trust in an automated system which can lead to the slow adoption, and even complete rejection of systems. Fostering safe and appropriate use of modern technologies requires better support for trust calibration which, in turn, calls for improved system transparency where the machine agent shares information regarding its status, reasoning, abilities, and plans for future actions with the human operator in a timely and effective manner. In this talk, aviation mishaps will be examined to illustrate problems with trust and transparency and suggest possible solutions to this challenge to human-machine teaming.

About the speaker...

Nadine Sarter is a Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Robotics at the University of Michigan where she also serves as Director of the Center for Ergonomics. Her primary research interests include (1) human-machine teaming, (2) operator trust in autonomous systems, (3) adaptive function allocation, (4) attention management, (5) multimodal interface design, (6) and the design of decision aids for high-tempo operations. She has conducted her work in a variety of application domains, including aviation and space, medicine, military operations, and the automotive industry. Dr. Sarter is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES). She serves as Associate Editor for ‘Human Factors’, the HFES’ flagship journal, and has contributed as an invited member on numerous government and scientific committees, most recently the National Academies Panel on Human Factors Science at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Human Performance Expert Panel To Inform The Air Force Strategy 2030, the National Academies Expert Panel on FAA Staffing Issues and the FAA Flight Deck Automation Working Group. She also served as an expert witness in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Investigative Hearing on Asiana Flight 214.