Learning Safe Interactions and Full-Control

This chapter is concerned with the problem of learning how to interact safely with complex automated systems. With large systems, human-machine interaction errors like automation surprises are more likely to happen. Full-control mental models are formal system abstractions embedding the required information to completely control a system and avoid interaction surprises. They represent the internal system understanding that should be achieved by perfect operators. However, this concept provides no information about how operators should reach that level of competence. This work investigates the problem of splitting the teaching of full-control mental models into smaller independent learning units. These units each allow to control a subset of the system and can be learned incrementally to control more and more features of the system. This chapter explains how to formalize the learning process based on an operator that merges mental models. On that basis, we show how to generate a set of learning units with the required properties

A formal framework for the analysis of human-machine interactions

There are more and more automated systems and people are led to interact with them everyday. They are also increasingly complex and exhibit more and more "smart" behaviour. One direct consequence is that it becomes harder for the human operators to drive those systems safely for both the system and the user. Due to that increasing complexity, interactions between users and automated systems are more likely to be error-prone. In particular, inadequately designed interactions may result in the user being surprised while interacting with the system. Several accidents are due to such surprising situations, as it can be testified by real accidents, including the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, the lethal radiation doses administered by the Therac 25 medical device or the shutdown of the aircraft of the KAL007 flight. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been studied for many years by researchers from various fields including psychology, human factors and ergonomics. This thesis follows a recent research direction that considers the use of formal methods to analyse the behavioural aspects of HMI. The focus is put on the actions or events exchanged between an operator and the system being used during an interaction. The work of this thesis builds on its initial inspiration from the recent work of Degani and Heymann that addressed the problem of automatically generating an adequate user interfaces for a given system model. In their work, an adequate user interface refers to one ensuring that potential mode confusion is avoided for the operator. The main contribution of this thesis is an analysis framework supported by formal methods that can be used to assess whether a system model is prone to potential automation surprises when being used by a human operator. The thesis develops a formalisation of automation surprises. It proposes and precisely characterises the full-control property that captures the fact that interactions between a system and its operator are free of potential automation surprises. It also defines a property, the full-control determinism, that guarantees the existence of a full-control conceptual model for a given system model. The thesis also defines precisely the minimal full-control conceptual model generation problem. The problem consists in finding a minimal conceptual model of the system model that allows full-control of it, which is only possible for fc-deterministic system models. Such full-control conceptual models can be used to generate artefacts to help the user to better understand them, such as user and training manuals. Three algorithms are proposed to solve the generation problem. The first one is based on Three-Valued Deterministic Finite Automata (3DFA) that are used to characterise the full-control property in terms of traces. The second one is based on a reduction approach inspired by the Paige-Tarjan algorithm that solves coarsest partition problems. Finally, the third one is based on an active learning approach based on the L* algorithm. The three proposed algorithms have been analysed for correctness and time complexity considerations. Moreover, the proposed framework, and therefore the proposed algorithms, have also been tested on various examples among which a large case study of an autopilot. That latter case study comes from ADEPT, a toolset to support designers in the early phases of the design of automation interfaces. That case study also shows how the proposed methodology could be integrated with ADEPT.(FSA - Sciences de l'ingénieur) -- UCL, 201

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Belgian Olympiads in Informatics: the story of launching a national contest

This paper describes the story of a new national contest through the experience of Belgium where the first olympiads in informatics were launched in 2010. Belgian Olympiads in Informatics is a multi-stage algorithmic, programming and logic contest composed of both pen-andpaper and on-computer tasks. The great focus on pen-and-paper tasks is a peculiarity of this contest. The context in Belgium is not the most favourable: programming courses at schools are quite rare,there are several official languages but none spoken by the entire population and the government does not give much means for helping organizing such a contest. This paper states how the contest was launched, explains the motivations behind the structure of the contest, the kind of tasks, the national delegation selection process and the training of the contestants

Automatic Detection of Potential Automation Surprises for ADEPT Models

This paper describes how to automatically detect potential automation surprises in interactive systems, within a rapid automation interface design tool named ADEPT. The proposed analysis method in this paper is based on a conformance relation, called full-control, between the model of the actual system and a mental model of it, that is, its behavior as perceived by the operator. The method can, among other things, automatically generate a so-called minimal full-control mental model for a given system. Systems are well designed if they can be described by relatively simple mental models for their operators, which can be assessed with the minimal full-control mental model generation algorithms. During the generation, potential automation surprises are detected and highlighted with execution examples that may lead to confusion. The analysis methods are based on an enriched version of labeled transition systems to describe the system and mental models. In order to be able to integrate the analysis method within ADEPT, a semantics for ADEPT models makes it possible to translate them into enriched LTSs. The proposed translation is automated for a specified class of ADEPT models that are characterized and defined in this paper. A case study demonstrates the proposed analysis framework and informs how the integration with ADEPT can be improved

Teaching programming and algorithm design with Pythia : a Web-Based learning platform

In Belgium, there are no or very few programming and algorithm design courses at secondary schools (12–18 years old). Students who can program are self-learners. The selection process for the Belgian delegation for the IOI, that has been set up two years ago, takes this situation into account. More initiatives should be taken to introduce computer science in secondary schools. This paper presents Pythia, a solution grader for programming and algorithm design problems based on a web application. Following the learning by doing motto, the proposed framework provides an accessible, usable, effective way to learn programming. To compensate for the lack of teachers with programming or algorithm design skills, Pythia delivers direct feedback to the students. The paper describes the design of the courses and the architecture of the tool. As future work, the proposed teaching technique has yet to be tested at large and evaluated

Recasting a traditional course into a MOOC by means of a SPOC

We give a practical approach to recast an existing, mature traditional university course into a MOOC. The approach has two steps. The first step consists in transforming the existing course into a course with two tracks: a SPOC and a traditional track. This step is done concurrently with teaching the course. The second step, which takes place one semester later, is the opening of the SPOC to the world as a MOOC. We have implemented this approach with the course LFSAB1402 Informatics 2, a second-year bachelor university-level programming course taught to all engineering students at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), that is, approximately 300 students per year. The approach has four advantages. First, it allows to design a SPOC covering only part of the material of the traditional course. A 5 credit (ECTS) one-semester course has almost twice the material of a six-week MOOC with two/three-hour lessons per week. Second, the workload of the transformation is reduced. It can be done incrementally during the teaching of the traditional course. Third, it allows us to gain experience in the world of MOOCs in a relative painless manner. And fourth, since the transformation is a large step, the risk of having problems in the final MOOC is reduced

Growing algorithmic thinking through interactive problems to encourage learning programming

Attracting pupils from secondary schools (12–18 years old) to learn programming is not easy. It is especially the case in Belgium where there is no or very few programming and algorithm design courses in secondary schools. Another issue is that teachers who are in charge of computer science courses are afraid of teaching a matter they do not feel comfortable with, especially when they are not informatics teachers. This paper presents ILPADS, interactive learning of programming and algorithm design skills, an interactive website which aims at gradually growing algorithmic thinking skills to lead pupils towards the learning of the Python programming language. That website aims to serve as working material to support teachers for their computer science courses in secondary schools. Pupils can also use the website at home to continue learning on their own. The paper presents the interactive website and mainly focuses on the design of the ILPADS activities. Future work includes testing the website in real classrooms and evaluating it