BCET PROFESSOR WINS BEST PAPER AWARD

Assistant Professor Jiang Li and his colleagues won the "Best Paper Presentation" award at the ModSim'09 conference held in Virginia Beach, October 14 - 16, 2009. Co-authors of the paper include Drs. Guangfan Zhang, Roger Xu and Wei Wang, from the Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI), Rockville, Maryland, and Professor Tom Schnell and his Ph.D student, Mike Keller, from the University of Iowa. The paper is in the context of cognitive modeling with a title of "Individual Cognitive Modeling for Closed-Loop Mitigation" resulting from a NASA SBIR phase I effort. This work also led to a NASA SBIR phase II award.   

An accurate real-time operator functional state assessment makes it possible to perform task management, minimize risks, and improve mission performance. This paper discusses the development of an individualized operator functional state assessment model that identifies states likely leading to operational errors. To address large individual variations, two machine-learning approaches have been proposed to build a model for each individual using its data as well as data from subjects with similar responses. If a subject's response is similar to that of the individual of interest in a specific functional state, all the training data from this subject will be used to build the individual model. Visit Professor Li's website for more information (http://www.ece.odu.edu/~jli/research.htm).