Studying shared situation awareness by agent-based simulation

Item does not contain fulltextShared Situation Awareness is an often employed concept in domains where teams of agents have to solve complex tasks in a distributed manner, like incident management and air traffic control. Although widely studied in the literature, the concept is difficult to be analyzed in a systematic manner, due to 1) the abundance of factors that can be related to Shared SA, and 2) the lack of a commonly agreed, formal definition. This paper proposes Agent-Based Social Simulation as a scientific method to study questions related to Shared SA. Founded in theories from Social Science, an agent-based framework is presented, which allows users to explore a variety of hypothetical scenarios in an automated manner. The resulting global patterns are illustrated by discussing a number of simulation results for different parameter settings. These simulations show that, although preliminary, the presented framework has potential as an analytical tool for researchers and policy makers.2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), 17-20 November 2013, Atlanta, Georgia, US

Studying Shared Situation Awareness by Agent-Based Simulation

Shared Situation Awareness is an often employed concept in domains where teams of agents have to solve complex tasks in a distributed manner, like incident management and air traffic control. Although widely studied in the literature, the concept is difficult to be analyzed in a systematic manner, due to 1) the abundance of factors that can be related to Shared SA, and 2) the lack of a commonly agreed, formal definition. This paper proposes Agent-Based Social Simulation as a scientific method to study questions related to Shared SA. Founded in theories from Social Science, an agent-based framework is presented, which allows users to explore a variety of hypothetical scenarios in an automated manner. The resulting global patterns are illustrated by discussing a number of simulation results for different parameter settings. These simulations show that, although preliminary, the presented framework has potential as an analytical tool for researchers and policy makers

Modelling the dynamics of team situation awareness

For decades both industry and academia have been interested in situation awareness, from individual situation awareness to system situation awareness of dynamic collaborative systems. Several theories and definitions exist for situation awareness and although considerable research has been conducted in this domain no definitive consensus has been reached. Therefore, the purpose of the research in this thesis is not develop new theories or definitions, but to explore how situation awareness presents itself in teams and systems in terms of team cognition. The methods used in this thesis include simulating team tasks using agent-based modelling, analysing team knowledge using concept maps and analysing team processes using entropy. In order to remove the risk of intrusion on the tasks being explored, the communications of team members are recorded and used as the primary data for the analyses conducted. Visually presenting knowledge of agents using concept maps made it easier to understand how the information was stored and transferred throughout the teams. An interesting result showed that it was not important for all agents to have the same information when key decisions were made and that when information is not shared the team performed better and with greater accuracy than when there was a focus on information sharing. Visually presenting team processes using entropy and process distribution allowed for patterns of behaviour to be identified. Results show that while individuals within teams feel confident with the amount of knowledge they have they will focus on working independent up until the point they can no longer achieve results on their own, at that point the team shifts to teamworking. The differences between teamwork and taskwork are related to the theories of shared and distributed situation awareness, concluding that shifts in team processes represent shifts in the two types of situation awareness

Studying and Supporting Activity Awareness in Collaborative Learning Groups: Using a Persuasive Social Actor

Collaborative learning is known as an effective learning method and various different kinds of technologies have been developed to support and facilitate collaborative learning. Many of these technologies are used to support the functional activities of a group of learners by enabling students to communicate, share documents and materials, track the work of the group, or distribute and allocate tasks. One factor that influences the success of collaborative groups is the awareness that members have of each others' activities i.e. activity awareness (Gutwin et al., 2004). Limited attention has been paid to promoting activity awareness in the collaborative learning literature. The work that does exist has focused on enhancing activity awareness by capturing and sharing details of the activity (e.g. Ganoe et al., 2003; Carroll et al., 2003). In contrast, there are no technologies that focus on the learners’ attitudes and behaviours with regard to activity awareness without considering the functional aspects of the group's work. This PhD hypothesises that persuasive technologies can offer a novel way of promoting activity awareness by changing learners’ attitudes and behaviours and persuading them to be more aware of fellow group members’ activities. This approach to enhancing activity awareness was investigated by using a persuasive social actor to change the attitudes and behaviours of learners who were working on collaborative learning projects over extended periods of time. Four studies were conducted: a pilot study to explore collaborative learning groups, an exploratory study to understand collaboration and activity awareness, a follow-up study to study activity awareness in depth, and a main study where a persuasive social actor for activity awareness in collaborative learning groups was developed and tested. All of these studies focused on a specific collaborative learning setting, in which small numbers of students (3 to 5) worked together in collaborative groups to complete real learning projects over approximately 6 weeks. This thesis makes four contributions to the fields of HCI and collaborative learning. The main contribution is a novel approach to enhance activity awareness in collaborative learning groups by changing learners’ attitudes and behaviours using a persuasive technology i.e. a persuasive social actor. The second contribution is a new method to evaluate activity awareness in collaborative learning groups. The third contribution is insight into how the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model (Oinas-kukkonen & Harjumaa, 2009) can be used in the design and evaluation of a persuasive social actor. The fourth contribution is an analysis of how students collaborate in long-term collaborative learning projects in naturalistic settings