Philippe Palanque

IRIT, FlexTech, France

Lecture. Human-AI Teaming, Safety, and Human-Computer Interaction Issues

Abstract.

   Automation, as a design goal, focusses mainly on the migration of tasks from a human operator to a mechanical or digital system. Designing automation thus usually consists in removing tasks or activities from that operator and in designing systems that will be able to perform them. When these automations are not adequately designed (or correctly understood by the operator), they may result in so called automation surprises that degrade, instead of enhance, the overall performance of the triplet (organization, operator, system). Usually, these tasks are considered at a high level of abstraction (related to work and work objectives) leaving unconsidered low-level, repetitive interactive tasks. This lecture proposes a decomposition of automation for interactive systems highlighting the diverse objectives it may target at. Beyond, multiple complementary views of automation for interactive systems design are presented to better define the polymorph nature of automation. It provides numerous concrete examples illustrating each view and identifies ten rules for designing interactive systems embedding automations. In the context where full automation seems an utopia, accurate design and evaluation of Human-Automation teaming appears to be the only efficient way of improving operations of command and control systems.

Bio. Dr. Philippe Palanque is Professor in Computer Science at the University Toulouse 3 "Paul Sabatier" and is head of the Reliability of System and Software Department at the “Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse” (IRIT) in France. Since the late 80s he has been working on the development and application of formal description techniques for interactive system. He has worked for more than 10 years on research projects to improve interactive Ground Segment Systems at the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and is also involved in the development of software architectures and user interface modeling for interactive cockpits in large civil aircraft (funded by Airbus). He was also involved in the research network HALA! (Higher Automation Levels in Aviation) funded by SESAR programme which targeted at building the future European air traffic management system. The main driver of Philippe's research over the last 20 years has been to address in an even way Usability, Safety and Dependability in order to build trustable safety critical interactive systems. As for conferences he is a member of the program committee of conferences in these domains such as SAFECOMP 2024 (43rd conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security), paper chair of EICS 2022 (14th annual conference on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems) and was co-chair of ACM CHI 2014 (32nd conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). He is the chair of the IFIP Technical Assembly and member of CHI academy.