Designing Transparent Automation

• Full talk title: Designing Transparent Automation to Improve the Human Use of Automated Advice
• Speaker: Professor Shayne Loft, University of Western Australia
• Location: Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Ave, Macquarie University (Wallumattagal Campus)

The Australian Defence Force recently published human-automation design principles articulating that automation needs to be designed to allow teams to achieve more with less personnel. For this to be realised, the impact of the design of human‐automation teaming interfaces on human cognition and performance needs to be further understood. Automated decision aids are increasingly used in Defence contexts to provide advice to human operators regarding the management and deployment of uninhabited vehicles (UVs). Decision aids typically improve human decision-making and reduce workload. However, decision aids can potentially provide incorrect advice, and if operators do not appropriately verify or do not understand the rationale underlying advice, they may accept incorrect advice or reject correct advice.

The colloquium will outline outcomes from a series of experiments funded by the Australian Research Council, and by the Office of Naval Research (Global), that have used a simulated uninhabited vehicle management task. The research has focused on discovering how to make the reasoning/rationale underlying automated advice more transparent to human operators to increase the accuracy with which humans use automated advice, without inadvertently increasing decision time or workload. The colloquium will also touch on outcomes of related work using computational modelling to formalise and quantify how humans integrate advice from automation to make decisions, and will discuss future research directions.

Light refreshments will be provided afterwards.

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About the speaker

Professor Shayne Loft received his PhD from the University of Queensland in 2004. He is currently a Professor at the University of Western Australia and has an ARC Future Fellowship (2021-2024). Shayne has co-authored 119 peer-reviewed journal papers, 45 industry (research/consultancy) reports, and 118 conference presentations. His research focuses on the application of theory and methods from cognitive (psychology) science to understand human behaviour and interaction with technology in complex workplaces to inform work design and training practices, with a focus on Aviation, Defence, and Road Safety.

Shayne has obtained $15.6 million of external competitive research funding. He has supervised 17 PhD, 16 Masters, and 36 honours students to completion, with alumni working across academia and industry. Shayne completed overlapping terms as Associate Editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (2017-2022) and for Human Factors (2015-2022). His currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Defence Science and Security Institute at the University of Western Australia.