Jon Whetzel

• MS (Computer Science), Texas A&M University
• Senior Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories

Cross Reality (XR) immersive environments offer challenges and opportunities in designing for cognitive aspects (e.g. learning, memory, attention, etc.) of information design and interactions. Information design is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving data science, communication science, cognitive science, media, and technology. In the present pa...

Much has been written on the potential for games to enhance our ability to study complex systems. In this chapter we focus on how we can use games to study national security issues. We reflect on the benefits of using games and the inherent difficulties that we must address. As a means of grounding the discussion, we will present a case study of a...

Physical site security heavily relies on expert teams continually examining and testing security profiles for discovering potential vulnerabilities. These experts hypothesize scenario(s) of interest and conduct “red versus blue” simulated exercises where they execute tactics that might reveal possible dangers. Due to the intensive manpower required...

Adaptive Thinking has been defined here as the capacity to recognize when a course of action that may have previously been effective is no longer effective and there is need to adjust strategy. Research was undertaken with human test subjects to identify the factors that contribute to adaptive thinking. It was discovered that those most effective i...

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) offer a unique laboratory for examining large-scale patterns of human behavior. In particular, the study of guilds in MMOGs has yielded insights about the forces driving the formation of human groups. In this paper, we present a computational model for predicting guild membership in MMOGs and evaluate the...

In this preliminary work, we study how public forum communication reflects and shapes virtual world behavior. We find that in-game groups have differential public posting habits; that player behavior is reflected in public communication (in particular, players who attack more are mentioned more in the public forums), and finally that public and per...

Complex systems are of interest to the scientific community due to their ubiquity and diversity in daily life. Popularity notwithstanding, the analysis of complex systems remains a difficult task, due to the problems in capturing high-volume data. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have recently emerged as a tractable way to analyze complex...

For teams working in complex task environments, instilling effective communication between team members is a primary goal during task training. Presently, responsibility for evaluating team communication abilities resides with instructors and outside observers who make qualitative assessments that are shared with the team following a training exerc...

For teams working in complex task environments, instilling effective communication between team members is a primary goal during task training. Presently, responsibility for evaluating team communication abilities resides with instructors and outside observers who make qualitative assessments that are shared with the team following a training exerc...

For teams working in complex task environments, instilling effective communication between team members is a primary goal during task training. Presently, responsibility for evaluating team communication abilities resides with instructors and outside observers who make qualitative assessments that are shared with the team following a training exerc...

Ground truth, a training game developed by Sandia National Laboratories in partnership with the University of Southern California GamePipe Lab, puts a player in the role of an incident commander working with teammate agents to respond to urban threats. These agents simulate certain emotions that a responder may feel during this high-stress situatio...

We investigated the comparative effectiveness and efficacy of human and intelligent agents as team training partners in terms of trainee complex skill acquisition (on Space Fortress), affective reactions to the training, and levels of task-specific self-efficacy. Using a dyadic training protocol in which 92 participants were paired with either a hu...

We investigated the comparative effectiveness and efficacy of human and intelligent agents as team training partners in terms of trainee complex skill acquisition (on Space Fortress), affective reactions to the training, and levels of task-specific self-efficacy. Using a dyadic training protocol in which 92 participants were paired with either a hu...

We describe briefly the redevelopment of Space Fortress (SF), a research tool widely used to study training of complex tasks involving both cognitive and motor skills, to be executed on current-generation systems with significantly extended capabilities, and then compare the performance of human participants on an original PC version of Space Fortr...

To support research on using intelligent agents in team training, a distributed multi-player game in Java that executes in real time was developed. Basing development on the game Space Fortress, which has been widely used by cognitive psychologists for studying training protocols, typical experiments involved in excess of 100 trials of the game und...

To support our research on using intelligent agents in team training, we have developed a distributed multiplayer game in Java that executes in real time. We based our development on the game Space Fortress, which has been widely used by cognitive psychologists for studying training protocols. Typical experiments involve in excess of 100 trials of...

The object of the 'Enabling Immersive Simulation for Complex Systems Analysis and Training' LDRD has been to research, design, and engineer a capability to develop simulations which (1) provide a rich, immersive interface for participation by real humans (exploiting existing high-performance game-engine technology wherever possible), and (2) can le...

Computer-based training systems have become a mainstay in military and private institutions for training people how to perform certain complex tasks. As these tasks expand in difficulty, intelligent agents will appear as virtual teammates or tutors assisting a trainee in performing and learning the task. For developing these agents, we must obtain...