Olivia B. Newton

University of Central Florida | UCF · College of Engineering & Computer Science

Team cognition research continues to evolve as the need for understanding and improving complex problem solving itself grows. Complex problem solving requires members to engage in a number of complicated collaborative processes to generate solutions. This chapter illustrates how the macrocognition in teams model, developed to guide research on thes...

As a result of fundamental changes in organizational needs and practices, social coding, a facet of modern collaboration, has become a prevalent phenomenon in software development. While the adoption of social media platforms for social coding, like GitHub, has enabled distributed, asynchronous collaboration among software developers, the structure...

This paper describes an approach integrating cognitive engineering with computational social science in the context of open source software (OSS) development. Through an analysis of large-scale collaborations in a complex operational setting, we study how expertise and task complexity predict changes in productivity when knowledge loss occurs. Usin...

In this study, we explore the future of work by examining differences in productivity when teams are composed of only humans or both humans and machine agents. Our objective was to characterize the similarities and differences between human and human–machine teams as they work to coordinate across their specialized roles. This form of research is i...

Gender diversity in open source software development continues to be a topic of growing interest among researchers, practitioners, and organizations. To date, research has revealed disparities in participation between developers on the basis of gender, with women being significantly underrepresented in open source development. Using a large data se...

This paper explains the design of a social network analysis framework, developed under DARPA’s SocialSim program, with novel architecture that models human emotional, cognitive, and social factors. Our framework is both theory and data-driven, and utilizes domain expertise. Our simulation effort helps understanding how information flows and evolves...

As the complexity of aircraft cockpit operations increases, training effectiveness must be improved, and learning accelerated. Virtual reality (VR) training is increasingly offered as a method for improving training efficacy given its ability to provide a rich sensory experience during learning. This paper describes a study examining how training e...

A significant challenge for the development of artificial social intelligence for effective human-machine teams is defining the forms of artificial knowledge structures needed for machine agents to meaningfully engage in collaboration. Relevant to this, individual and shared knowledge structure concepts have been proposed across a variety of discip...

Our goal is to understand the characteristics of high-performing teams on GitHub. Towards this end, we collect data from software repositories and evaluate teams by examining differences in productivity. Our study focuses on the team formation phase, the first six months after repository creation. To better understand team activity, we clustered re...

This paper investigates the problem of predicting student flight performance in a training simulation from multimodal features, including flight controls, visual attention, and knowledge acquisition tests. This is a key component of developing next generation training simulations that can optimize the usage of student training time. Two types of su...

The primary purpose of this article is to determine the impact of a simulated agent's transparency on human performance and related variables, such as response time, workload, and trust calibration. The agent supports participants as they complete a base defense task by managing a team of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles and serves as a decision aid...

Although open source software (OSS) lowers barriers to participation, it is also a site of toxic geek masculinity, which can be seen in the emergence of non-consensual fake pornography, or deepfakes. Drawing from studies of non-consensual pornography and past research on gender on GitHub, a popular social coding platform for OSS, we assert that the...

Recent advances in uncertainty visualization research have focused not only on design features to support decision making, but also on challenges of evaluating the effectiveness of uncertainty visualizations, such as the degree to which individuals’ baseline task comprehension may alter their performance on experimental tasks regardless of a visual...

This study examined how human-robot interaction is influenced by individual differences in theory of mind ability. Participants engaged in a hallway navigation task with a robot over a number of trials. The display on the robot and its proxemics behavior was manipulated, and participants made mental state attributions across trials. Participant abi...

Presented at the 63rd International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Empirical evaluations of uncertainty visualizations often employ complex experimental tasks to ensure ecological validity. However, if training for such tasks is not sufficient for naïve participants, differences in performance could be due to the visualizations or to differences in task comprehension, making interpretation of findings problematic....

This study investigated how humans interact socially with robots. Participants engaged in a hallway navigation task with a robot. Throughout twelve trials, the display on the robot and its proxemics behavior was varied while participants were tasked with first, reacting to the robot’s actions and second, interpreting its behavior. Results indicated...

Traditional studies in uncertainty visualization often require naive participants to complete complex, domain-specific tasks in order to examine how effectively a visualization conveys uncertainty to support decision making. However, without assessing whether participants understand such tasks, it can be difficult to determine whether differences i...

This paper discusses an approach for the development of visualizations intended to support cognitive processes deemed fundamental in the maintenance of Situation Awareness under conditions of uncertainty. We integrate ideas on external cognition from the cognitive sciences with methods for interactive visualization to help cognitive engineering exa...

This paper discusses an approach for the development of visualizations intended to support cognitive processes deemed fundamental in the maintenance of Situation Awareness under conditions of uncertainty. We integrate ideas on external cognition from the cognitive sciences with methods for interactive visualization to help cognitive engineering exa...

This paper describes initial validation of a theoretical framework to support research on the visualization of uncertainty. Two experiments replicated and extended this framework, illustrating how the manipulation of task complexity produces differences in performance. Additionally, using a combinatory metric of workload and performance, this frame...

We evaluated the usability and utility of an unmanned vehicle management interface that was developed based on the Situation awareness–based Agent Transparency model. We sought to examine the effect of increasing levels of agent transparency on operator task performance and perceived usability of the agent. Usability and utility were assessed throu...

Situation Awareness is a popular concept used to assess human agents’ understanding of a system and any error that may occur due to poor understanding. However, the popular conception of situation awareness retains assumptions better suited for linear, controlled systems. When assessing complex systems, rife with non-linear, emergent behaviors, cur...