Nathan Bos

• PhD
• Research Associate at Johns Hopkins University

Insider threats are individuals who pose significant security risks but are difficult to identify with traditional methods that rely on passively collected data. Recently, active indicators have been developed as a more active monitoring method designed to evoke differential behaviors in insider threats and benign employees. While these methods hav...

Humans should be able work more effectively with artificial intelligence-based systems when they can predict likely failures and form useful mental models of how the systems work. We conducted a study of human’s mental models of artificial intelligence systems focusing on a high-performing image classifier. Participants viewed individual labeled im...

Humans should be able work more effectively with artificial intelligence-based systems when they can predict likely failures and form useful mental models of how the systems work. We conducted a study of human's mental models of artificial intelligence systems focusing on a high-performing image classifier. Participants viewed individual labeled im...

Many of the challenges associated with cybersecurity operations are also ripe opportunities for the application of human-machine teaming. Advances in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning promise the technology to achieve the level of intelligence and sophistication necessary to create a true intelligent teammate. This pa...

Open plan offices are both popular and controversial. We studied the response of a group moving from shared, but closed offices to an open plan office. The main data source reported here is a workplace satisfaction survey given pre-move, post-move, and to a lab baseline comparison group at the same organization, with some additional data from obser...

Social network graphs are often used to help inform judgments in a variety of domains, such as public health, law enforcement, and political science. Across two studies, we examined how graph features influenced probabilistic judgments in graph-based social network analysis and identified multiple heuristics that participants used to inform these j...

Game-based training may have different characteristics than other forms of instruction. The independent validation of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Sirius program evaluated game-based cognitive bias training across several games with a common set of control groups. Control groups included a professionally produced vid...

Cyber defense requires decision making under uncertainty, yet this critical area has not been a focus of research in judgment and decision-making. Future defense systems, which will rely on software-defined networks and may employ “moving target” defenses, will increasingly automate lower level detection and analysis, but will still require humans...

Most cyber security research is focused on detecting network intrusions or anomalies through the use of automated methods, exploratory visual analytics systems, or real-time monitoring using dynamic visual representations. However, there has been minimal investigation of effective decision support systems for cyber analysts. This paper describes th...

In this paper we introduce a measure for the consistency of Twitter user behavior as a way of measuring engagement with a topic. Using this measure of topical engagement, we filter tweets collected from over 90,000 Nigerian users over a three-year period concerning that country's head of state, President Goodluck Jonathan. We show that this measure...

The cognitive and organizational challenges associated with `Big Data' have not received much research attention. We have begun an interview study of analysts who work in the computer network (cyber) defense (CND) area and have experienced changes in data scale affecting their analytical work. Our goal is to understand any changes in analysts' ment...

This paper analyzes a corpus of Nigerian Tweets collected during the run-up to the 2011 Nigerian Presidential election and compares it with official election returns and polling data. We found that counts of the mentions on Twitter of the two major candidates correlated strongly with polling and election results when compared across the country's g...

This proceedings volume contains the accepted papers and posters from the 2013 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction. This was the sixth year of the SBP conference, and the third since it merged with the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics. In 2013 the SBP conference conti...

Modern organizations often consist of teams in which some people are collocated and some are remote. These teams are in-between being entirely virtual to entirely face-to-face and are referred to as partially distributed teams. Partially distributed teams function and operate in two different media environments, varying in availability of communica...

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the relative influence of location and shared identity in partially distributed work. Using an experimental task called Shape Factory, groups of eight participants were configured such that in the baseline 'strangers' condition only the location-based faultline was present while in the experimenta...

Today, the responsibility for U.S. cyber defense is divided asymmetrically between a large population of cyber-naïve end-users and a small cadre of cyber-savvy security experts in government and the private sector. We foresee the rise of "Cyber Civil Defense" driven by the perception of vulnerabilities in our present over-reliance on professionals...

There is growing interest in the use of social media in the developing world. For example, the Arab Spring was widely considered to have been heavily influenced by information that propagated via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Researchers are understandably eager to begin utilizing this growing collection of data to help inform some of...

Command and control (C2) cognitive systems engineering science and technology covers many areas of investigation. In the past, studies at APL have focused on the design of text messaging and TouchTable interfaces, on the impact of fatigue on cognitive performance, and on how the quality of data and the geographic distribution of the team impact col...

Long distance collaboration is an increasingly important aspect of command and control (C2). It is not always possible, or desirable, for all relevant experts and decision makers to be collocated during time-sensitive missions. However, geographic distance and the associated problems of narrow communications bandwidth, lack of trust, and biased att...

M odels of human dynamics on a national scale are a current area of research interest. High-quality models could improve the nation's ability to manage social and political conflicts, win counterinsurgency struggles, conduct peacekeeping missions, and even prevent conflicts before they begin. Such models can potentially be used for research, policy...

This paper explores how the dynamics of coalition games change when there are two asset types that act as multipliers on each other. Coalitions often form between groups with complementary assets, e.g., a group with a strong military may align with another that has strong popular support. Assets such as popular support can act as 'force multipliers...

Studies of political violence have found a somewhat counter-intuitive, inverted 'IT shaped relationship between violence and governance. While the naive expectation might be that more repressive regimes would experience more civil wars and other forms of violence, several studies have found a different effect. On the continuum between dictatorship...

Previous research on partially distributed teams has revealed a cluster of problems, including difficulty coordinating, 'ingroup' formation among members in different locations, and lower trust in teammates across distance. But these prior studies involved groups of strangers; would pre-existing groups have the same problems? We recruited groups fr...

Many of today's political conflicts are based on social identity differences, and sides are drawn up along ethnic, religious, ideological lines. Socio-cultural modeling efforts need to be able to incorporate realistic social identity dynamics that are based in academic literature and build on prior work. This paper reviews four modeling efforts in...

Ethical standards for human subjects research have not kept up with new research paradigms. Several research areas are particularly problematic for the CHI community. Online social research is testing the boundaries of public observation, third-party disclosure, and anonymization methods. Furthermore, there are differences in norms about what is an...

Modern organizations often bring together groups in which some people are collocated and some remote. These groups often take the form of loosely-organized networks rather than hierarchies. Partially distributed groups may have characteristics that are different from fully collocated or fully distributed groups, such as being particularly vulnerabl...

The need to document, manage, transfer, analyze, and preserve digital data is a significant driver of the development of tools and technologies for e-research. This 'data deluge' is the result of new instruments that collect or log massive amounts of data, the output of large-scale computer simulations, the product of experiments that produce vast...

This book examines various aspects of collaboratories, including the possibility of adopting a scientific approach for such efforts. It finds that a specific scientific approach is adopted in initiating collaboration between geographically dispersed scientists. The book considers that a scientific approach is suitable for such efforts as it helps i...

This chapter examines how collaboratory participation gives rise to a “public goods” problem. It focuses on data contributions to one kind of collaboratory, namely community data systems (CDSs), which have some similarities with traditional public goods experimental tasks. The chapter examines how these projects find solutions to the problem of the...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

This chapter focuses on developing a theory of remote scientific collaboration (TORSC) on the basis of data derived from the Science of Collaboratories project undertaken by the National Science Foundation. The theory includes studies in the sociology of science and investigations of remote scientific collaboration. The chapter reveals that the suc...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

Promoting affiliation between scientists is relatively easy, but creating larger organizational structures is much more difficult, due to traditions of scientific independence, difficulties of sharing implicit knowledge, and formal organizational barriers. The Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project conducted a broad five-year review to take stock...

Under what circumstances might a group member be better off as a long-distance participant rather than collocated? We ran a set of experiments to study how partially-distributed groups collaborate when skill sets are unequally distributed. Partially distributed groups are those where some collaborators work together in the same space (collocated) a...

There is an increasing need for business students to be taught the ability to think through ethical dilemmas faced by corporations conducting business on a global scale. This article describes a multiplayer online simulation game, ISLAND TELECOM, that exposes students to ethical dilemmas in international business. Through role playing and perspecti...

The rapid acceleration of online course offerings presents a design challenge for instructors who want to take materials developed for face-to-face settings and adapt them for asynchronous online usage. Broadcast lectures are relatively easy to transfer, but adapting content is harder when classes use small-group discussions, as in role-playing or...

In studies of virtual teams, it is difficult to determine pure effects of geographic isolation and uneven communication technology. We developed a multi-agent computer model in NetLogo to complement laboratory-based organizational simulations [3]. In the lab, favoritism among collocated team members (collocators) appeared to increase their performa...

As the computer game industry grows, game capabilities and designs are being re-used for purposes other than entertainment. The study of 'Serious Games', i.e. games for education and policy making, is of growing interest in many sectors. This SIG will bring together people interested in the topic area to discuss emerging opportunities and challenge...

This experimental study looks at how relocation affected the collaboration patterns of partially-distributed work groups. Partially distributed teams have part of their membership together in one location and part joining at a distance. These teams have some characteristics of collocated teams, some of distributed (virtual) teams, and some dynamics...

Business school students need experience working in large problem spaces with messy, realistic data. THE UTILITY COMPANY (TUC) simulates a gas and electric company preparing for deregulation, with deeply embedded problems related to customer service, information technology, human resources, and social justice issues in serving diverse clients. Stud...

This study employed an experimental simulation to examine how well individuals and an entire distributed team could perform tasks when some members changed locations. Meanwhile, on a theoretical level it probed into the mechanism of how personnel rotation affected performance. We found that the impacts of personnel movements were asymmetric within...

Modern workplaces often bring together virtual teams where some members are collocated, and some participate remotely. We are using a simulation game to study collaborations of 10-person groups, with five collocated members and five isolates (simulated 'telecommuters'). Individual players in this game buy and sell 'shapes' from each other in order...

Effective communication and coordination across multiple sites is extremely important for global software development. An experimental simula- tion that mimics an interdependent software divi- sion working across multiple locations was designed to study this phenomenon. Six experi- ments were run, each with participants divided into four or five si...

We present an ongoing research project utilizing navigation and hyperlink data to aid collaborative knowledge building. We allow collaborators to personally organize documents and other research resources and make references to them. We combine their personal organizations and references to develop a unified, hierarchical categorization of these re...

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Vid...

This interactive session at CSCL 2002 will present, and add to our ongoing study of design principles for educational technology. We are seeking to capture key findings of the field using a three-level framework, including these interlinked components: educational goals, design principles, and software features.

When small groups meet online, the communication channel they use may affect the emergent leadership styles that individuals attempt. We studied 66 three-person groups playing a social dilemma game and communicating via one of four channels: face-to-face, videoconference, audio conference, or Internet chatroom. We found that the narrower the channe...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. If, however, people meet before using CMC, they trust each other, trust being established through touch. Here we show that if participants do not meet beforehand but rather engage in various getting-acquainted activities over a network, trust is muc...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. Rocco [4] found, for example, that discussions about agreements conducted over email were far less successful in engendering trust than those conducted face-to-face. But, if the participants met and did a team building exercise before the real task,...

We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. Three-person groups did 30 rounds of a social dilemma game and we measured trust by the extent to which they cooperated vs. competed. The face-to-face groups quickly achieved cooperative behavior, while t...

Can high school students become contributors as well as users on the World Wide Web? This research explores a new Web-based curriculum idea, that of having students write and publish critical “reviews” of scientific resources. Writing reviews can be a means of both practicing critical evaluation of Web resources, and of making an authentic value-ad...

We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. Three-person groups did 30 rounds of a social dilemma game and we measured trust by the extent to which they cooperated vs. competed. The face-to-face groups quickly achieved cooperative behavior, while t...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. Rocco [4] found, for example, that discussions about agreements conducted over email were far less successful in engendering trust than those conducted face-to-face. But, if the participants met and did a team building exercise before the real task,...

This research explores a new web-based curriculum idea, that of having students write and publish critical web “reviews” of scientific resources as a means of both practicing critical evaluation of web resources, and of making an authentic value-added contribution to the web. This paper presents content analyses of selected sections of 63 web revie...

Learners use software for different reasons and with differentskills and motivations than other users. Using concepts of learner-centered design (LCD), we developed a user interface for supporting learners as they use digital information resources in inquiry-based science classrooms. Learner needs are categorized in five areas: content knowledge, t...

This dissertation investigates the emerging affordance of the World Wide Web as a place for high school students to become authors and publishers of information. Two empirical studies lay groundwork for student publishing by examining learning issues related to audience adaptation in writing, motivation and engagement with hypermedia, design, probl...

The University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) Project provides guidelines and design standards for teaching and learning materials and methods to support science inquiry using on-line resources. In this paper, we present an initial report of our experiences using on-line resources to promote sustained inquiry in science classrooms. We examine t...

Students can make authentic contributions to the World Wide Web (WWW) and learn critical evaluation skills by publishing reviews of WWW resources. A project which served as a pilot study was implemented where high school students wrote and published reviews of resources they used as part of an inquiry-based science curriculum. Students were support...

In a student Internet research project, 82 ninth-grade students created and used a shared bibliographic database of resources which they found on the World Wide Web. This paper analyzes the students' use of the database in terms of two dimensions: 1) how much students were involved in collaboration as opposed to individually-oriented activities, an...

Students can develop writing skills and a sense of audience by publishing their work on the World Wide Web and receiving feedback from outside readers. This paper is both a theoretical test of a model for analyzing these outside-the-classroom audiences and a description of a project in which this model was successfully used. The model for authentic...

In a student Internet research project, 82 ninth-grade students created and used a shared bibliographic database of resources which they found on the World Wide Web. This paper analyzes the students' use of the database in terms of two dimensions: 1) how much students were involved in collaboration as opposed to individually-oriented activities, an...

Goal theory of achievement motivation provided the framework for an investigation of the relationship among young adolescents' motivational orientation, perceptions of the educational environment, and psychological well-being. One hundred sixty-eight sixth graders' reports of personal achievement goals and perceptions of the school as stressing tas...

A descriptive study was conducted to determine whether staff nurses identified the same nursing diagnoses and defining characteristics from a written case study. A convenience sample of 83 staff nurses from four acute care institutions participated in the study. Of the total diagnostic statements made, 43% were the same as those identified by an ex...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Artemis interface to the University of Michigan Digital Library, which was built to assist students in searching on-line collections. Noteworthy features of Artemis include the ability to store search results in an on-line workspace, browse collections as well as keyword-search, and access diver...

What do game designers know about sustaining learner engagement? This paper analyzed the popular simulation game SimCity with the goal of identifying design principles that would be useful for educators. The term 'organic feedback' is used to describe how SimCity gradually increases the complexity of its simulations and gives players a constant, pl...

Describes the SimMAP program at the UM Ross School of Business that captures student action-based learning experiences and re-uses this content as simulation content for other UMBS classes. This paper described the first year of progress in this area, how some key challenges were addressed, and shows the pedagogical models for re-use we have develo...

Fun and work are becoming intertwined in employees' experiences. Whether through serious games, social software, best practices, or corporate culture, fun at work is shaping how workers collaborate with each other. This workshop seeks to bring together a diverse community exploring research related to fun in a work context. Through position papers...

There is an increasing need for business students to be taught the ability to wade through ethical dilemmas faced by corporations conducting business on a global scale. This paper describes a multiplayer online simulation game that exposes students to ethical dilemmas in international business. Through role playing and perspective taking, we wanted...