An Analysis of Heterogeneity in Futuristic Unmanned Vehicle Systems

Recent studies have shown that with appropriate operator decision support and with enough automation aboard unmanned vehicles, inverting the multiple operators to single-vehicle control paradigm is possible. These studies, however, have generally focused on homogeneous teams of vehicles, and have not completely addressed either the manifestation of heterogeneity in vehicle teams, or the effects of heterogeneity on operator capacity. An important implication of heterogeneity in unmanned vehicle teams is an increase in the diversity of possible team configurations available for each operator, as well as an increase in the diversity of possible attention allocation schemes that can be utilized by operators. To this end, this paper introduces a resource allocation framework that defines the strategies and processes that lead to alternate team configurations. The framework also highlights the sub-components of operator attention allocation schemes that can impact overall performance when supervising heterogeneous unmanned vehicle teams. A subsequent discrete event simulation model of a single operator supervising multiple heterogeneous vehicles and tasks explores operator performance under different heterogeneous team compositions and varying attention allocation strategies. Results from the discrete event simulation model show that the change in performance when switching from a homogeneous team to a heterogeneous one is highly dependent on the change in operator utilization. Heterogeneous teams that result in lower operator utilization can lead to improved performance under certain operator strategies.Prepared for Charles River Analytic

The Impact of Heterogeneity on Operator Performance in Future Unmanned Vehicle Systems

Recent studies have shown that with appropriate operator decision support and with sufficient automation, inverting the multiple operators to single-unmanned vehicle control paradigm is possible. These studies, however, have generally focused on homogeneous teams of vehicles, and have not completely addressed either the manifestation of heterogeneity in vehicle teams, or the effects of heterogeneity on operator capacity. An important implication of heterogeneity in unmanned vehicle teams is an increase in the diversity of possible team configurations available for each operator, as well as an increase in the diversity of possible attention allocation schemes that can be utilized by operators. To this end, this paper introduces a discrete event simulation (DES) model as a means to model a single operator supervising multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicles. The DES model can be used to understand the impact of varying both vehicle team design variables (such as team composition) and operator design variables (including attention allocation strategies). The model also highlights the sub-components of operator attention allocation schemes that can impact overall performance when supervising heterogeneous unmanned vehicle teams. Results from an experimental case study are then used to validate the model, and make predictions about operator performance for various heterogeneous team configurations.The research was supported by Charles River Analytics, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Optimizing Software Team Performance with Cultural Differences

Software development is primarily a team task that requires a high degree of coordination among team members. Prior research has indicated that the composition of team member traits such as personality and culture can influence the performance of software teams. However, this line of research does not give practical guidance on how to build teams with personnel constraints. Some research has built teams by starting with personality. However, cultural traits—which are also known to influence team performance—have not been examined in the same manner. This research, therefore, builds upon this stream by: 1) examining the effects of Hofstede’s latest six-dimensional model of national culture, 2) segmenting potential software team members into distinct cultural clusters, and 3) testing the outcomes of teams built upon homogeneous versus heterogeneous cultural compositions over time. Our results indicate that—consistent with prior research—homogenous team compositions are initially better for performance. However, this effect reverses over time, and ultimately heterogenous team compositions are superior

Learning heterogeneous subgraph representations for team discovery

The team discovery task is concerned with finding a group of experts from a collaboration network who would collectively cover a desirable set of skills. Most prior work for team discovery either adopt graph-based or neural mapping approaches. Graph-based approaches are computationally intractable often leading to sub-optimal team selection. Neural mapping approaches have better performance, however, are still limited as they learn individual representations for skills and experts and are often prone to overfitting given the sparsity of collaboration networks. Thus, we define the team discovery task as one of learning subgraph representations from a heterogeneous collaboration network where the subgraphs represent teams which are then used to identify relevant teams for a given set of skills. As such, our approach captures local (node interactions with each team) and global (subgraph interactions between teams) characteristics of the representation network and allows us to easily map between any homogeneous and heterogeneous subgraphs in the network to effectively discover teams. Our experiments over two real-world datasets from different domains, namely DBLP bibliographic dataset with 10,647 papers and IMDB with 4882 movies, illustrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on a range of ranking and quality metrics. More specifically, in terms of ranking metrics, we are superior to the best baseline by approximately 15 % on the DBLP dataset and by approximately 20 % on the IMDB dataset. Further, our findings illustrate that our approach consistently shows a robust performance improvement over the baselines

Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision‐making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e‐mail, teleconferencing combined with e‐Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media

Incentive Effects in Asymmetric Tournaments Empirical Evidence from the German Hockey League

Following tournament theory, incentives will be rather low if the contestants of a tournament are heterogeneous. We empirically test this prediction using a large dataset from the German Hockey League. Our results show that indeed the intensity of a game is lower if the teams are more heterogeneous. This effect can be observed for the game as a whole as well as for the ?rst and last third. When dividing the teams in the dataset into favorites and underdogs, we only observe a reduction of effort provision from favorite teams. As the number of games per team changes between different seasons, we can also investigate the effect of a changing spread between winner and loser prize. In line with theory, teams reduce effort if the spread declines. Interestingly, effort is also sensitive to the total number of teams in the league even if the price spread remains unchanged

Bridging Faultlines by Valuing Diversity: Diversity Beliefs, Information Elaboration, and Performance in Diverse Work Groups

Although there are numerous potential benefits to diversity in work groups, converging dimensions of diversity often prevent groups from exploiting this potential. In a study of heterogeneous decision-making groups, we examined whether the disruptive effects of diversity faultlines can be overcome by convincing groups of the value in diversity. Groups were either persuaded of the value of diversity or of the value of similarity for group performance, and they were provided with either homogeneous or heterogeneous information. As expected, informationally diverse groups performed better when they held pro-diversity rather than pro-similarity beliefs, whereas the performance of informationally homogeneous groups was unaffected by diversity beliefs. This effect was mediated by group-level information elaboration. Implications for diversity management in organizations are discussed.Diversity;Diversity Beliefs;Faultlines;Information Elaboration;Team Performance