When the Going Gets Tough: Exploring Agent-based Models of Human Performance under Demanding Conditions

Treur, J. [Promotor]Hoogendoorn, M. [Copromotor

Blended support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research

This paper discusses blended support for undergraduate students to perform interdisciplinary research in teams. Interdisciplinary research is a complex process that consists of multiple steps and requires collaboration with people from different backgrounds. This paper presents research done at Liberal Arts and Sciences, Utrecht University (LAS), where students learn to do interdisciplinary research as part of the core curriculum. Considering the complexity of doing interdisciplinary research, it is important that students are guided in this process. Blended support that combines technologymediated guidance and face-to-face meetings would be of use to help students become more independent interdisciplinary researchers. This paper explores preferences in blended support, based on a survey and interviews with second and third year students and with undergraduate research supervisors at LAS, UU. Results indicated that there are different activities during the interdisciplinary research process where technology-mediated support would be of value. However, students and supervisors especially value meeting face-to-face when doing interdisciplinary integration. This should be taken into account when designing a blended framework for support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research

An Agent Model for Analysis of Human Performance Quality

A human's performance in a complex task is highly dependent on the demands of the task, in the sense that highly demanding situations will often cause a degradation of performance. To maintain performance quality usually extra effort has to be contributed. However, the resources for such extra effort available to the human are limited. In this paper an agent model is proposed in which different types of relations between effort, task demands and performance quality can be used to analyse the human's performance quality. It is illustrated how a support agent incorporating this model can support a human based on different performance criteria. The agent model thus allows to build agent applications that provide optimal support depending on a specific situation and goal of the task. © 2013 ? IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved

Modeling Situation Awareness in Human-Like Agents using Mental Models

In order for agents to be able to act intelligently in an environment, a first necessary step is to become aware of the current situation in the environment. Forming such awareness is not a trivial matter. Appropriate observations should be selected by the agent, and the observation results should be interpreted and combined into one coherent picture. Humans use dedicated mental models which represent the relationships between various observations and the formation of beliefs about the environment, which then again direct the further observations to be performed. In this paper, a generic agent model for situation awareness is proposed that is able to take a mental model as input, and utilize this model to create a picture of the current situation. In order to show the suitability of the approach, it has been applied within the domain of F-16 fighter pilot training for which a dedicated mental model has been specified, and simulations experiments have been conducted