Biblio

Technology’s role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and validate cyber defense systems according to basic principles and design philosophy. Concurrently, the collective science must advance. These goals are not mutually exclusive pursuits: therefore, toward both these ends, this research provides cyber-cognitive links between cyber defense challenges and major human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research areas that offer solutions and instructive paths forward. In each area, there exist cyber research opportunities and realms of core HFE science for exploration. We raise the cyber defense domain up to the HFE community at-large as a sprawling area for scientific discovery and contribution.

Alex Endert's dissertation "Semantic Interaction for Visual Analytics: Inferring Analytical Reasoning for Model Steering" described semantic interaction, a user interaction methodology for visual analytics (VA). It showed that user interaction embodies users' analytic process and can thus be mapped to model-steering functionality for "human-in-the-loop" system design. The dissertation contributed a framework (or pipeline) that describes such a process, a prototype VA system to test semantic interaction, and a user evaluation to demonstrate semantic interaction's impact on the analytic process. This research is influencing current VA research and has implications for future VA research.

Dagger is a modeling and visualization framework that addresses the challenge of representing knowledge and information for decision-makers, enabling them to better comprehend the operational context of network security data. It allows users to answer critical questions such as “Given that I care about mission X, is there any reason I should be worried about what is going on in cyberspace?” or “If this system fails, will I still be able to accomplish my mission?”.

We propose 10 challenges for making automation components into effective "team players" when they interact with people in significant ways. Our analysis is based on some of the principles of human-centered computing that we have developed individually and jointly over the years, and is adapted from a more comprehensive examination of common ground and coordination.