Human Technology Interaction

Multiple faculty and graduate students in the Department of Systems & Information Engineering (SIE) at UVa are conducting research on national security topics for defense and intelligence agencies. These include ONR, NRL, Air Force, and DARPA.  Much of their work concerns human-technology interaction, which spans the human factors, robotics, and safety disciplines. The goal of this research is to make systems both safe and resilient—topics for which UVA Systems Engineering has a long history. Few (if any) modern complex systems operate without a person involved, with people often being the final decision maker or line of defense against failure: an arrangement that can both produce error or add resilience. To make effective choices, the person must fully understand the situation and how their decisions will affect the future. 

Our collective efforts have focused on: (i) understanding human-system interactions to define system roles, boundaries, policies, and requirements; (ii) crafting user interfaces that use different sensory modalities (i.e., visual, auditory, and tactile) to most effectively convey information to people in dynamic environments; and (iii) building modeling formalisms, algorithms, and analyses that provide guarantees about safety, performance, and resilience during human-machine and human-robot interactions. With the rise and increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), human-technology interaction and the human’s role in systems engineering are being disrupted. This will result in unique risks and opportunities for system safety and resilience. Our team is well-positioned to address these challenges. This could include: developing novel means of explaining AI decisions to human users; designing human-appropriate, prompt-based specification languages to ensure accurate generative AI outputs; engineering interfaces to facilitate human-machine interaction and appropriately calibrated trust; and innovating new ways for humans to interact with and control machines. 

Faculty involved in this research include Gregory Gerling, Matthew Bolton, Sara Riggs, and Tariq Iqbal, whose profiles appear below.