Esa Rantanen

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Rochester Institute of Technology

This research investigated human performance in response to task demands that may be used to convey information about the human to an artificial agent. We performed an experiment with a dynamic time-sharing task to investigate participants development of temporal awareness of the task event unfolding in time. Temporal awareness as an extension, or...

Using signal detection theory (SDT) and fuzzy SDT, the influence of familiarity with phishing and having a background in cybersecurity on phishing behavior was examined. The results from SDT analysis indicated that familiarity with phishing only accounted for 11% of the variance in sensitivity and 5% in bias. When examining the same using Fuzzy SDT...

Machine learning (ML) is making significant inroads into the field of medicine. It can be used as a preventative measure by predicting a patient’s diagnosis and introducing early treatment to prevent adverse outcomes or lessen their impact. However, despite many demonstrated advantages of machine learning tools in health-care, their performance ass...

In this study, we examined different models of cognitive control in dynamic time-sharing situations. We investigated attentional allocation by registering participants’ eye movements while they performed a new time-sharing task that forced them to solve resource conflicts between subtasks through prioritization. Participants were monitoring four su...

In today’s digital economy, the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected devices, humans, and everyday objects to each other in ways that were unimaginable before. Vast amounts of data are collected everywhere and disrupting how we design systems and products. Data science and emerging technologies offer challenges and opportunities for early-career...

This panel discussion is third in a series examining the educational challenges facing future human factors and ergonomics professionals. The past two panels have focused on training of technical skills in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to human factors students. This panel discussion expands on these topics and argues f...

Human factors/ergonomics is an applied discipline. As such, we question whether students are adequately prepared if they are not learning, at least in part, from instructors who have real-world experience applying human factors/ergonomics knowledge to practical design problems. A wide variety of other disciplines such as medicine, the building trad...

Education and career development of new generations of human factors professionals has rightly been a central concern the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society for many decades. There have been periodic surveys to track the changing employer expectations for new professionals, and there have been several panel discussion at the HFES Annual Meetings...

The continued advances in artificial intelligence and automation through machine learning applications, under the heading of data science, gives reason for pause within the educator community as we consider how to position future human factors engineers to contribute meaningfully in these projects. Do the lessons we learned and now teach regarding...

The discipline of human factors and ergonomics is largely focused on principled development of generalizable solutions. The process is typically slow, spanning months, even years. A crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic presents a different problem. How can human factors and ergonomics professionals react quickly, within hours or days, to provide vi...

The explosion of data science (DS) in all areas of technology coupled with the rapid growth of machine learning (ML) techniques in the last decade create novel applications in automation. Many working with DS techniques rely on the concept of “black boxes” to explain how ML works, noting that algorithms find patterns in the data that humans might n...

In two experiments, participants tracked the identity and location of moving words. The task bears resemblance to one performed by air traffic controllers who track multiple moving aircraft, where they are identified with relatively complex alphanumeric call signs. In Experiment 1, stimulus familiarity was manipulated by comparing the tracking of f...

The education of future human factors professionals is a critically important topic and a concern for the professional associations of human factors/ergonomics professionals. The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) has a long history of involvement in the career development of its members and the Education Technical Group has encouraged pre...

To reduce clutter on wide-area geographic data view displays of electric power systems, substations in geographically compact areas should be spread out and line overlaps and intersections minimized. Such patterns optimized with respect to given constraints can be modeled as a multicommodity flow problem. Due to the size of the developed model, we...

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is a conceptual framework that allows for analysis of all factors that affect human-system interactions. The products of this system of analyses can then be directly transformed into design requirements for information systems. Doing CWA by hand is quite tedious, however, and larger projects where data are collected fr...

The application of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data in the power industry is currently an area of intense interest. The key driver for PMU technology is to use the precise time sources provided by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to accurately measure the relative voltage and current phase angles at buses across an interconnect at a ver...

This study was a replicate of two prior studies on the knowledge and skill expectations for new human factors/ergonomics professionals in the current labor market. Five and four years have passed since new HF/E professionals and their employers were last surveyed. In the rapidly changing work domains it is important to track the changing expectatio...

The labor market as a whole and specifically those areas where human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) professionals are employed are in constant flux. Academic institutions, on the other hand, tend to be more stable with changes in programs happening much more slowly. There is some evidence that the education of new HF/E professionals falls short of meeti...

Nursing is a high workload profession, and excessive workload has been shown to have an adverse effect on patient care. Prior research has focused on patient-staff ratios and skill mix to analyze the relationship of workload and degradation of care. This study used a comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach for analyzing nurses’ workload in a larg...

Although low participation in incident-reporting systems contributes to the problem of poor error prevention, little research has focused on improving participation. The present study is a case study of a hospital’s incident reporting practices, seeking to increase both the number and quality of their incident reports by examining the usability of...

Adherence to human factors/ergonomics standards is critical to a good design project. No other resource can provide a designer with specifications based on sound science than a good standards book or info-guide. However, designers usually come up with ideas to solve problems and leave the manufacturing and technical specifications to the engineers....

There exists a disconnect between users of the science of human factors, that is, designers and practitioners, and producers of the science, that is, human factors researchers. Research results are primarily disseminated by articles published in scientific, peer reviewed journals, that are often targeted to other scientists, not designers or practi...

To continually track changing skills and knowledge requirements for human factors professionals in the labor market, an archival human factors jobs database was created. The database contains relevant information from human factors job announcements, including required degree and field of education, required and preferred experience, and informatio...

This project took a unique perspective on the investigation of decision making in healthcare by examining clinician-patient consultation using methods from linguistics and communication. Our goal was to identify cognitive and behavioral patterns in interactions of clinicians-in-trainings with patients that correspond to decision making processes in...

The dual process model (Evans, 2008) posits two types of decision-making, which may be ordered on a continuum from intuitive to analytical (Hammond, 1981). This work uses a dataset of narrated image-based clinical reasoning, collected from physicians as they diagnosed dermatological cases presented as images. Two annotators with training in cogniti...

A particular challenge to professors of human factors/ergonomics courses in academia is to make their syllabi and course contents relevant to the demands placed on graduates from human factors programs as they enter the labor market. Recent surveys suggest that academic curricula indeed fall short of expectations in several critical areas. To respo...

To educate the future human factors/ergonomics workforce and meet the demand for new professionals in the field, academic institutions must pay close attention to the ever-changing skills and knowledge expectations in the labor market. These trends are not easy to track, however. Surveys of new professionals about their experiences in their first j...

Resident physicians endure substantial amounts of stress to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to become competent, certified physicians. Multiple factors that contribute to high levels of stress in different areas of the healthcare domain have been identified, but stress continues to be a major problem despite this knowledge and efforts to...

A relatively new form of human communication, video-conferencing has become more popular as video technology improves and with increasing demands for real-time communication across greater distances. The full effects of video-conferencing on human communication are still being explored. Video-conferencing is presumed to be a somewhat richer form of...

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s Education and Training Committee and the Early Career Committee identified the need to evaluate the effectiveness of graduate education in the field of human factors/ergonomics and identify areas requiring improvement. Consequently, a survey to determine the expectations of current students was developed....

This paper reports the results from a survey administered to individuals in several companies whose responsibilities included either hiring or supervision of new human factors/ergonomics professionals. The survey asked about the knowledge and skills expected from new professionals entering the workplace. It was based on the survey previously admini...

Little is known about air traffic controllers' preferred maneuvers to resolve conflicts between pairs of aircraft, despite the topic's importance of to the planned NextGen system. We analyzed 256 cases of conflict resolution maneuvering from radar track data from 5 U.S. air traffic control centers. Our results show the influences of conflict geomet...

This research examined individual differences in judgments of the risk of aircraft separation violation. Fourteen controllers were asked to judge the risk of conflict for aircraft pairs varying in geometry and vertical separation. A cluster analysis revealed individual differences in how judgments of conflict risk changed with increased vertical se...

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society's Education and Training Committee and the Early Career Committee identified the need to evaluate the effectiveness of graduate education in the field of human fac-tors/ergonomics and identify areas requiring improvement. Consequently, a survey was constructed for this purpose. Fifty-two new professionals re...

A usability survey of various cybercollaboration techologies with 32 questions was created and administered through the Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) Clipboard online survey tool. A total of 73 responses were received and analyzed. There was no participant consensus on what tools to include in “ideal” cybercollaborative environments. Th...

This paper seeks to make a distinction between cognitive processes involved in conflict risk judgment and those involved in conflict avoidance decisions (controllers’ interventions for separation assurance). First, we conducted a systematic review of the conflict detection literature to identify studies that focused on conflict risk assessments and...

This research investigated an observer’s ability to track and maintain multiple uniquely iden- tified objects in a dynamic environment similar to ATC. The experimental task consisted of tracking a set of moving objects for twenty seconds. The objects were 6-character strings; three letters followed by three numbers. After tracking the objects for t...

We analyzed samples of aircraft track data involving conflict alerts and subsequent resolution maneuvers from five U.S. air route traffic control centers. Vertical conflict resolution maneuvers were used in the majority of the cases examined. Within the vertical dimension, reductions of current vertical change (climb or descent) were collectively t...

Among the most distractive in-vehicle interactions are audio and climate controls. If these interactions were as easy and spontaneous as natural language, driving could be much safer. Through this research it was found that drivers preferred gestural language to voice language when the control was simple and repetitive; subsequently, gestural inter...

Time efficacy reflects people's perception of control time and evaluation of time management behaviors, and potentially influences situation awareness (SA) and mental workload experienced by air traffic controllers. In this study, a total of 31 air traffic controller trainees, assigned to a high or low time efficacy group, completed 2 scenarios wit...

Temporal awareness, or level 3 situation awareness, is critical to successful control of air traffic, yet the construct remains ill-defined and difficult to measure. This research sought evidence for air traffic controllers' awareness of temporal characteristics of their tasks in data from a high-fidelity system evaluation simulation. Five teams of...

Creativity is often defined in ways that are neither useful nor operationalizable. We proposed a new definition for creativity that incorporates the Skills-Rules-Knowledge model of Rasmussen (1983). We then examine the tests of creativity and real world design problems alongside each other with this new definition in mind. Participants completed si...

We examined the effect of velocity vectors on human ability to extrapolate movement of multiple moving objects. This was achieved using an identity tracking task, in which objects (line-drawings of familiar ob- jects) first move for 5 s, after which they temporarily disappear from view. In order to examine different aspects of vector information, w...

In this study, we tested the relevance of two models of conflict judgments in air traffic control (ATC). Both models aim to explain air traffic controllers (ATCos) performances when completing a conflict detection task. Understanding how ATCos detect conflict has gained a regain of interest since future Air Traffic Management systems required auto...

The aim of the study was to identify the determinants of conflict detection risk judgments in air traffic control. Fourteen expert controllers made conflict risk judgments about air traffic situations in which three variables (conflict geometry, time of closest point of approach or TCPA, and vertical separation between aircraft) were manipulated. T...

A cognitive task analysis of reliability coordinators in an electric power system control center was performed in conjunction with evaluation of three novel display solutions for line overload detection and correction. Eight experienced regional operations center operators participated in the study. The operators were shown two different geographic...

Voice communication with air traffic control (ATC) taxes pilots' cognitive abilities, contributing to errors that reduce safety. External aids such as note-taking help pilots manage communication demands, and may especially benefit older pilots. Emerging technologies provide new opportunities for external aids that are integrated with other systems...

Since 2004, NCSA's Cybercollaboratory, which is built on top of the open source Liferay portal framework, has been evolving as part of NCSA's efforts to build national cyberinfrastructure to support collaborative research in environmental engineering and hydrological sciences and allow users to efficiently share contents (sensors, data, model, docu...

The Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM) represents a second-generation approach to human reliability analysis (HRA). The method, however, is very tedious to apply manually and not yet in widespread use and therefore largely untested. To allow for rapid and systematic evaluation of the CREAM method, a software tool for its applic...

Availability of measures that would predict controller success in his or her task and the impact of changing procedures and advancing technology on the system as a whole is imperative to the success of modernization of air traffic control (ATC) systems worldwide. This paper describes a database that is populated by the results of previous reviews o...

The paper introduces a new technique for power system visualization known as geographic data views, or GDVs. The impetus behind the development of GDVs is to use dynamically created visualization in order to show a wider range of power system information than is possible using the existing geographically based wide-area visualizations that are beco...

The ability to model, analyze, simulate and verify realistic air traffic management conflict detection scenarios in a scalable, composable, multi-aircraft fashion is an extremely difficult endeavor. Verifiably accurate techniques for aircraft mode detection are critical in order to enable the accurate projection of aircraft conflicts, and for the e...

This experiment attempted to identify the features of air traffic geometry that would influence the difficulty and biases of pilots' conflict detection using a cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI). There was previously no systematic study on effects of such features on conflict detection using the CDTI. Twenty-four pilots viewed dynamic en...

Intrusion detection (ID) is one of network security engineers' most important tasks. Textual (command-line) and visual interfaces are two common modalities used to support engineers in ID. We conducted a controlled experiment comparing a representative textual and visual interface for ID to develop a deeper understanding about the relative strength...

A total of 24 pilots viewed dynamic encounters between their own aircraft and an intruder aircraft on a 2-D cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI) and estimated the point and time of closest approach. A three-level alerting system provided a correct categorical estimate of the projected miss distance on 83% of the trials. The remaining 17% o...

The effectiveness of Personal Computer-Based Aviation Training Devices (PCATDs) and Flight Training Devices (FTDs) to meet FAA recency of experience requirements for instrument flight are currently under investigation. Two types of training devices are being evaluated: a Jeppesen FS-200 PCATD and a Frasca 141 FTD. Instrument-current pilots received...

Mental workload experienced by air traffic controllers cannot be measured directly but may be inferred from observable performance or task load imposed on them by volume and complexity of traffic. This research evaluated several measures used to quantify the aforementioned variables. Data were obtained from Indianapolis (ZID) and Kansas City (ZKC)...

The role of the air traffic controller in future air traffic management systems is that of a passive monitor, who intervenes in potential conflict situations only if pilots, aided by onboard traffic displays, fail to im- plement safe and timely conflict resolutions. Yet, such scenarios are entirely plausible and even likely, par- ticularly in busy...

A task analysis is conducted for the complex task of network security engineers, intrusion detection (ID) of computer networks. ID helps engineers protect network from harmful attacks and can be broken down into the following phases: pre-processing information, monitoring the network, analyzing attacks, and responding to attacks. Different cognitiv...

Curriculum reviews are performed to provide grounds for adjustments necessary due to changes in student enrollment, teaching faculty, and goals and objectives of programs that have a substantial human factors component. This task is arguably quite difficult due to the very broad spectrum of the human factors disci-pline and lack of widely accepted...

The purpose of this panel is report on the work of the Undergraduate Program Recognition Committee and to encourage discussion among attendees on the proposed criteria developed by the committee. The paper and the panel discussion will provide an overview of the graduate program accreditation process, report on the work of the Special Task Force on...

This paper provides a framework for identifying and evaluating the human performance implications of new avionics technology such as the cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI). Several important human factors issues in developing and implementing the CDTI are discussed in terms of their effects on the two primary flight tasks associated with...

One of the main factors in all aviation accidents is human error. Therefore, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Aviation Safety Program (AvSP) has identified several human factors safety technologies to address this problem. Some technologies directly address human error either by attempting to reduce the occurrence of errors...

Experienced air traffic controllers and college students participated in 2 experiments we conducted to test a hypothesis that controllers evaluate potential conflicts between aircraft in a hierarchical manner, comparing altitudes first for vertical separation, then extrapolating aircraft trajectories for lateral separation, and finally performing s...

Use of ground-based flight training devices in flight training is attractive for several reasons. In addition to undeniable safety aspects and immunity to weather, ground trainers also offer benefits in terms of training effectiveness, typically measured by the time or number of trials saved over training exclusively in an airplane. A review of 19...

Communication taxes pilots' cognitive resources. External aids such as note-taking help pilots manage these demands. Morrow et al. (2003) found that note-taking eliminated age differences among pilots on a readback task compared to a no-aid condition. However, we investigated communication-only rather than multi-task environments typical of pilotin...

the analyses beyond those of the mean developed. Results from two experiments, one abstract, the other realistic, are presented in terms of timely performance on required tasks. As taskload increased, the partici- pants were less likely to act on the experimental tasks at an earliest opportunity than under low taskload, resulting in increase of ‘to...

An incremental transfer of training research design was used to measure the effectiveness of a flight training device (FTD) and to determine the point at which additional training in a FTD was no longer effective. The dependent measures were number of trials to specific completion standards, time to complete a flight lesson, and time to a successfu...

Means of communication between pilots and controllers is one of the fundamental principles of air traffic control (ATC). Consequently, air-ground communications will both reflect the taskload imposed on the controller as well as drive the workload experienced by the controller. Therefore, analysis of ATC communications could potentially reveal a ve...

The impact of digital technology-induced delays in the pilot-controller communications on air traffic controllers' performance and workload was investigated in 2 experiments manipulating systemic audio delay (AD) and variable pilot delay (PD). Vectoring accuracy (Experiment 1), lateral separation between 2 aircraft on converging tracks (Experiment...

Development of an electronic user manual/checklist for a steam-generating power plant boiler start-up is described. Human factors guidelines for development of effective instructional materials were reviewed. Subject matter experts (experienced operators at the power plant) were used to gain requisite knowledge in the procedures and tasks involved...

The goal of this panel is to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches that may inform and support the design of temporal aspects of interactive systems. Time Design is an emerging research and development domain that emphasizes the functional, causal role of time in human control behavior. It draws on a diverse literature on time in cognit...

This paper discusses an experimental paradigm for measuring human performance under time pressure. Participants were presented with four simultaneous number-entry tasks. Entry could occur only within a discrete window of opportunity, represented visually by a target range within a variable-speed progress bar. Participants could view only one task a...

This study reports the development and evaluation of time series based objective pilot performance metrics. From a previously developed array of autocorrelation and Fourier analysis based metrics, five Fourier-based metrics that employed a threshold value were chosen to investigate their effectiveness in separating pilots who, based on instructor p...

We explored the effects of conflict geometry on pilot conflict understanding, manifested in estimation accuracy of three continuous variables: miss distance, time to closest point of approach, and orientation at the closest point of approach. Results indicated (a) increased difficulty of understanding with conflicts that occurred with slower speeds...

Automated objective pilot performance measures potentially enhance and expand traditional proficiency evaluation methods by an instructor pilot. Quantitative performance data also can be utilized in research and subjected to various analyses to reveal covert patterns in pilots' performance. In spite of a relatively long history of research, routine...

Abstract This report describes an experiment that evaluated pilots’ ability tounderstand and detect air traffic conflicts on a cockpit display of traffic information (CDTI), without the aid of an automated conflict alerting system. This ability was manifested in estimation accuracy of three continuous variables: miss distance at closest point of ap...

This study examined the effectiveness of personal computer aviation training devices (PCATDs) for maintaining the Federal Aviation Administration's instrument-currency requirement. One hundred and six instrument-current pilots received an instrument proficiency check (IPC) and were assigned equally to 3 independent training groups (aircraft, flight...

A special project involving a campus utility plant HMI evaluation was offered to a group of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory human factors class. Fifteen out of 55 students enrolled in the course volunteered for the special project. Specific subtasks were created in collaboration with the plant management and allocated to subgroup...

Automated warning and alert devices such as airborne collision avoidance systems (ACASs) represent a class of automation that is often found to be imperfect. The imperfections can be expressed as the number of false alarms or missed events. Most ACASs are constructed with a bias to prevent misses (which may have catastrophic consequences) and there...

Many human factors issues in aircraft maintenance are directly related to the technicians' working environment and can be addressed in the maintenance facility design. The goal of this project was to identify and catalog human factors issues that should be considered from the outset in the design of a new maintenance facility for the Institute of A...

One of the main factors in all aviation accidents is human error. The NASA Aviation Safety Program (AvSP), therefore, has identified several human-factors safety technologies to address this issue. Some technologies directly address human error either by attempting to reduce the occurrence of errors or by mitigating the negative consequences of err...