Stephen Martin Fiore

• Ph.D.
• Managing Director at University of Central Florida

This study examines the integration of Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) into human teams, focusing on how ASI can enhance teamwork processes in complex tasks. Teams of three participants collaborated with ASI advisors designed to exhibit Artificial Theory of Mind (AToM) while engaged in an interdependent task. A profiling model was used to cate...

Long-duration and long-distance space missions create a complicated context for collaboration. The combination of environmental and psychosocial factors will negatively impact individual and team cognition, potentially jeopardizing mission success. To provide a richer understanding of the issues surrounding team cognition for future space explorati...

Many issues in training system design and development may be mitigated by applying and improving requirements engineering processes. Building on prior work pertaining to team training and collaborative problem solving (CPS), this work examines the value of empirical and technical literature as a source for requirements elicitation. We apply a novel...

Effective teamwork requires both individual domain-specific knowledge and social cognitive skills. In this paper, we discuss a theoretical approach that incorporates metacognitive training to enhance social cognition and theory of mind within teams. By using scaffolding techniques to address cognitive biases, we aim to facilitate efficient collabor...

Teams are essential for most modern work. But who or what is a team? With today’s rapidly diverse team contexts and the diversity of research frameworks for studying them, there is no longer a definitive answer to this question. Thus, Cooke et al. introduced “teamness,” a construct through which future research can describe teamwork as a function o...

This paper explores the concept of “immersion” in virtual reality (VR) systems, emphasizing the technological aspects that contribute to a comprehensive and multisensory user experience. Immersion refers to a system’s technological capabilities to provide extensive, multisensory displays surrounding the user. While factors like display resolution,...

In this paper we discuss the relationship between cognitive processing demands and virtual reality. Advancements in technology and cost efficiency are driving the implementation of immersive virtual reality (I-VR) in training and education, offering an experiential method for learning complex skills and knowledge that would otherwise be too costly...

Trust in automation and team communication are crucial factors in human-agent teaming. While research has examined how trust in automation and team dynamics impact performance separately, less is known about how they combine to influence team dynamics. This study investigated how team speech dynamics are related to trust in automation, team percept...

Technological advances are increasing the complexity of, interactivity with, and cognitive demands on, human agents, particularly when AI is introduced. If we are to successfully reduce cognitive workload (CWL), we must adjust how we conceptualize cognition in manned-unmanned teaming environments. Towards this end, we draw from cognitive science th...

This work develops interpretable models to predict near-real-time cognitive workload (CWL) in teams operating in complex environments. Existing approaches using neurological sensors are impractical for field use. Our approach integrates multimodal data from non-invasive behavioral and physiological sensors to robustly detect CWL changes. We apply m...

Technological advances are increasing the complexity of, interactivity with, and cognitive demands on, human agents, particularly when AI is introduced. If we are to successfully reduce cognitive workload (CWL), we must adjust how we conceptualize cognition in manned-unmanned teaming environments. Towards this end, we draw from cognitive science th...

We describe an approach aimed at helping artificial intelligence develop theory of mind of their human teammates to support team interactions. We show how this can be supported through the provision of quantifiable, machine-readable, a priori information about the human team members to an agent. We first show how our profiling approach can capture...

This report describes an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the Jian et al. “Trust in Automation” questionnaire and re-analysis of human–machine trust data using a two-factor model of the items (Jian J-Y, Bisantz AM, Drury CG. Foundations for an empirically determined scale of trust in automated systems. Int J Cogn Ergon. 2000;4(1):53–71). The pu...

Video gaming experience has been found to impact behavior and performance on experimental tasks, can influence cognitive processes, and may even transfer to proficiency in novel tasks. There is a growing need for an empirically validated generalizable tool that can capture differences in participants gaming experience due to the growing representat...

Near future human-autonomy teams (HATs) will feature artificial agents with increasingly advanced social capabilities. The social atmosphere of a team is known to be important for successful teaming; however, it is not clear that factors influencing human-to-human exchanges will transfer directly to human-autonomy exchanges. Here, using data from t...

In this study, we validate and extend previous theoretical and empirical work on the design of visualizations to support decision makers using interfaces with high levels of information density and evolving constraints. Prior research proposed and validated a theoretical framework of task complexity to facilitate the systematic evaluation of uncert...

In this workshop paper, we describe results from a mixed-methods study of social diversity and corporate engagement in free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. We collected survey responses from contributors to FLOSS development on GitHub to characterize perceptions of social diversity and corporate involvement in projects. We addition...

Advances in technology combined with lowering costs have resulted in a swift rise in the implementation of immersive virtual reality (I-VR) across numerous segments of society. Simultaneously, researchers, educators, and industry experts are increasingly interested in developing I-VR technologies and strategies to enhance learning in both education...

Introduction The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive factors, how common these factors are across performance domains remains unclear. The current study sought to int...

Widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is substantially affecting the human condition in ways that are not yet well understood. Negative unintended consequences abound including the perpetuation and exacerbation of societal inequalities and divisions via algorithmic decision making. We present six grand challenges for the...

Video gaming experience has been found to impact behavior and performance on experimental tasks, can influence cognitive processes, and may even transfer to tasking proficiency. The purpose of the investigations reported in this manuscript were jointly to examine the relationships between video game experience and mental model formation as well as...

In this article we discuss the role of Artificial Theory of Mind (AToM) in supporting human-agent teaming interactions. Humans are able to interpret, understand, and predict another’s behavior by leveraging core socio-cognitive processes, generally referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A human’s ToM is critical to their ability to successfully inter...

Socially intelligent artificial agents have recently shown some evidence of improving team performance when advising human teammates during the execution of time-pressured, complex missions. These agents, imbued with a form of social intelligence supported by Artificial Theory of Mind, have also demonstrated some negative outcomes associated with t...

Future Artificial Intelligence (AI) teammates will need to take on more teaming and collaborative responsibilities in human-agent teams to advance those teams' capacities and improve performance. To do so, an AI will require artificial social intelligence (ASI) in order to effectively anticipate, predict, and respond to humans in ways that take int...

Purpose: 1) Help novice students scaffold problem-solving, engage safely in the deliberate practice of diagnostic reasoning and medical decision-making in real-time; 2) Assess how accurately students gather and apply data in medical reasoning and treatment during High Fidelity Patient Simulations (HFPS); 3) Identify students scientific misconcepti...

This paper examines how the principles of 4E cognition can be used to interpret, and potentially improve, immersive virtual reality (I-VR). A selection of relevant 4E + I-VR studies are reviewed to illustrate this relationship. Towards this end, this paper provides: 1) an overview of Immersive Virtual reality (I-VR), 2) a summary of 4E cognition (e...

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...

What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and quantifiable. In this perspective piece, we link metrics to mechanisms by demonstrating how emerging metrics of scien...

In this paper, we discuss the development of artificial theory of mind as foundational to an agent's ability to collaborate with human team members. Agents imbued with artificial social intelligence will require various capabilities to gather the social data needed to inform an artificial theory of mind of their human counterparts. We draw from soc...

What is scientific knowledge, and how is it created, accumulated, transformed, and used? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the structures and mechanisms of science, in addition to the metrics that are easily collectable and quantifiable. In this review article, we link metrics to mechanisms, by demonst...

The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport, and depends on a range of cognitive factors. How common these key performance factors are across application domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the pe...

It is widely understood that diffusion of and simultaneous interactions between narratives -- defined here as persistent point-of-view messaging -- significantly contributes to the shaping of political discourse and public opinion. In this work, we propose a methodology based on Multi-Variate Hawkes Processes and our newly-introduced Process Influe...

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...

Current approaches to player profiling are limited in that they typically employ only a single one of numerous of available techniques shown to have utility for categorizing and explaining player behavior. We propose a more comprehensive Video Game Player Profile Framework that considers the demographic, psychographic, mental model, and behavioral...

Research and development in virtual reality (VR) continues to influence all sectors of society. This has been particularly the case in the application of VR for learning and training. Due to the affordability of VR, it increasingly is providing a safe and cost-effective technology for studying learning and training. In this paper, we summarize find...

This panel will provide a transdisciplinary perspective on developing artificial social intelligence for teams. A panel with representatives from the cognitive, computational, and neural sciences will discuss theoretical, methodological, and technological insights derived from their respective disciplines. These perspectives will be integrated via...

This symposium provides a complementary set of papers exploring frameworks and models for developing artificial social intelligence (ASI) for teams. ASI consists of components of social cognition that support teamwork and more general interpersonal interactions. Although AI is rapidly evolving and fielded in a variety of operational settings, the i...

Technological advances have led to a rapid increase in the implementation of virtual reality (VR) across multiple sectors of society. Further, we are seeing more researchers explore how the technology can be used to promote learning and training in a variety of domains. But there is a problematic gap between development of VR for training and educa...

Artificial intelligence has been developed to perform all manner of tasks but has not gained capabilities to support social cognition. We suggest that teams comprised of both humans and artificially intelligent agents cannot achieve optimal team performance unless all teammates have the capacity to employ social-cognitive mechanisms. These form the...

It is widely understood that diffusion of and simultaneous interactions between narratives—defined here as persistent point-of-view messaging—significantly contributes to the shaping of political discourse and public opinion. In this work, we propose a methodology based on Multi-Variate Hawkes Processes and our newly-introduced Process Influence Me...

We discuss the potential for near-future artificial social intelligences (ASIs) to exhibit functional artificial theory of mind in a video-game based teaming scenario. We also describe the impact of individual differences on mental model formation and mental state development. We focus on the possibility for an ASI to develop profiles of human agen...

Many of the most popular intelligent training systems, including driving and flight simulators, generate user time series data. This paper presents a comparison of representation options for two different student modeling problems: 1) early failure prediction and 2) classifying student activities. Data for this analysis was gathered from pilots exe...

Mentoring in academic medicine is essential for faculty to achieve their professional and personal goals. Faculty in academic health centers are expected to be proficient in clinical, teaching, scholarship, and administrative duties while balancing the four-legged mission of the medical school: education, research, patient care, and community colla...

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...

The modern information environment provides an opportunity for cognitive engineering to inform the study of information operations, which involve strategic, often politically-motivated actions to manipulate a targeted audience. In this paper we integrate interdisciplinary theoretical concepts to provide a foundation for a model of persuasion in inf...

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 panel will provide a transdisciplinary perspective on developing artificial social intelligence for teams. A panel with representatives from the cognitive, computational, and neural sciences will discuss theoretical, methodological, and technological insights derived from their respective disciplines. These perspectives will be integrated via...

The present challenges of long duration spaceflight and other missions in extreme environments include changes of sensory functions, including vision impairment and changes in taste perception. In order to monitor and improve astronaut health and performance during long duration spaceflight and future spaceflight missions we studied sensory functio...

Understanding changes in individual motor function and how it relates to workload, personality types, and shared knowledge is vital to the success of team‐based missions. Such changes may present a challenge in long duration spaceflight and other missions in extreme environments. Therefore, we studied grip strength, dexterity, stress level, task lo...

The objective of this study was to measure potential changes in cognitive function in response to living in an extreme underwater habitat. Chronic high stress and intense workload can affect individual and team cognition. As such, associated variables were monitored during the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO) 23 mission at the Aqu...

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 in understanding how information flows and evolv...

In the early twenty-first century, many have lamented the lack of a sufficient scientific workforce capable of contributing to the modern knowledge-intensive economy. At the same time, others have noted the lack of a scientific workforce capable of collaborating across scientific disciplines. The combination of these factors leads to a need to bett...

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 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...

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

Individuals within an organization who repeatedly fall victim to phishing emails, referred to as Repeat Clickers, present a significant security risk to the organizations within which they operate. The causal factors for Repeat Clicking are poorly understood. This paper argues that this behavior afflicts a persistent minority of users and is explai...

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) has been receiving increasing international attention because much of the complex work in the modern world is performed by teams. However, systematic education and training on CPS is lacking for those entering and participating in the workforce. In 2015, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA),...

Cyber-attacks are a common aspect of modern life. While cyber based attacks can expose private information or shut down online services, some of the most potentially dangerous attacks change the sensor and control data utilized by Industrial Control Systems for the intended purpose of causing severe damage to the technical processes that these syst...

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...

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...

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...

Cyber-attacks are a common aspect of modern life. While cyber based attacks can expose private information or shut down online services, some of the most potentially dangerous attacks change the sensor and control data utilized by Industrial Control Systems for the intended purpose of causing severe damage to the technical processes that these syst...

During collaborative problem solving (CPS), coordination occurs at different spatial and temporal scales. This multiscale coordination should play a functional role in facilitating effective collaboration. To evaluate this, we conducted a study of computer-based CPS with 42 dyadic teams. We used cross-wavelet coherence to examine movement coordinat...

Built structures, such as animal nests or buildings that humans occupy, serve two overarching purposes: shelter and a space where individuals interact. The former has dominated much of the discussion in the literature. But, as the study of collective behaviour expands, it is time to elucidate the role of the built environment in shaping collective...

The complex research, policy and industrial challenges of the twenty-first century require collaborative problem solving. Assessments suggest that, globally, many graduates lack necessary competencies. There is a pressing need, therefore, to improve and expand teaching of collaborative problem solving in our education systems.

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...

Collaborations among researchers and across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries are vital to address increasingly complex challenges and opportunities in science and society. In addition, unprecedented technological advances create new opportunities to capitalize on a broader range of expertise and information in scientific collab...

We describe a computational model of social norms based on identifying values that a certain culture finds desirable such as dignity, generosity and politeness. The model quantifies these values in the form of Culture-Sanctioned Social Metrics (CSSMs) and treats social norms as the requirement to maximize these metrics from the perspective of the s...

The UCF College of Medicine M.D. curriculum includes a 16‐week Structure and Function module in the first year in which students learn basic medical physiology. The module includes five high‐fidelity simulations that require students to apply physiological knowledge to develop treatment plans in acute care situations. Students work collaboratively...

A pair of policy experts highlights tension in team science and, inadvertently, in the study of scientific teams

We describe a computational model of social norms based on identifying values that a certain culture finds desirable such as dignity, generosity and politeness. The model quantifies these values in the form of Culture-Sanctioned Social Metrics (CSSMs) and treats social norms as the requirement to maximize these metrics from the perspective of the s...

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...

Environmental sustainability has grown as a topic of interest in the scientific community and has gained mainstream attention. This paper focuses on issues to consider when designing and assessing the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) as persuasive technology. We propose a set of research guidelines to inform future work on how to enhance VR’s...

Purpose - In a variety of domains, teams represent the main mechanism for dealing with change, complexity, and uncertainty in organizations. Consequently, teams need to be able to adapt and effectively use shared and complementary cognitive processing while collaborating to deal with these challenges. Methodology/approach - A conceptual review is p...

As research on teams becomes increasingly sophisticated, scientists face challenges related to understanding collaboration at multiple levels of analysis, beyond that of the individual or the group alone. Grounded in Hackman’s work on interaction and levels of analysis, this chapter explores theory development for understanding team collaboration f...

We first contextualize Gibson’s views within the broader space of theories about perception. We do this to illustrate how Gibson’s perspective, more so than many others, is most intimately connected with place. For, unlike many dualists, and those drawing on inferential theory, Gibson’s foundational claim is that place is directly perceived. As suc...

Despite the obvious influence of space on interactions, constraints imposed by the built environment are seldom considered when examining collective behaviours of animals and humans. We propose an interdisciplinary path towards uncovering the impact of architecture on collective outcomes.

Introduction Research organizations face challenges in creating infrastructures that cultivates and sustains interdisciplinary team science. The objective of this paper is to identify structural elements of organizations and training that promote team science. Methods We qualitatively analyzed the National Institutes of Health’s Building Interdisc...

Multiple theories of problem-solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem-solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem-solving (CPS) with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is u...

In this paper we advance team theory by describing how cognition occurs across the distribution of members and the artifacts and technology that support their efforts. We draw from complementary theorizing coming out of cognitive engineering and cognitive science that views forms of cognition as external and extended and integrate this with theoriz...