Edwin L. Hutchins - US grants

The goals of this project, called "Academic Institutional Memory" (AIM), are to: refine a set of tools that encourage researchers to increase their use of electronic information sources during research;incorporate machine learning mechanisms that are capable of transforming these researchers' browsing behaviors into self-organizing information structures; and analyze the information structures built manually by the researchers and automatically by the learning mechanism as "artifacts", created by the cultural process of science. In addition to its contribution to machine learning and the philosophy of science, this kind of theoretical analysis is necessary to understand how new information retrieval tools can become part of the infra-structure coordinating the activities of modern scientists. The work under this award will revolve around three related themes: the development of a theory of science and scientific activity as a cultural process; implementation of a prototype of the AIM system as a data collection technology that will permit the testing of hypotheses from the theory; and development of computational models that capture the regularities predicted by the theory.

9311496 Hutchins This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Culture is a process that makes available to humans resources for the organization of behavior. This organization is accomplished via both learned internal cognitive structures and created social and material structures in the environment. Until recently, the cognitive sciences have not had very good conceptual tools for describing the interaction of individual behavior and culturalprocess. The P.I. is engaged in a project which uses computer simulations to complement theories of culture and cognition via modelling the properties of groups of interacting learning agents. By taking the group as a unit of analysis-both here and in the real-world study of cognition-the investigator has made important progress toward a theory which reunites social and material mediators of individual behavior with traditional individual cognitive properties. The P.I. proposes establishing a dedicated research project centered on simulations of cultural process for the purpose of elaborating this theory.

This is a three-year continuing award. To ensure that new workplaces and digital work materials serve human needs requires both a different theoretical base and an integration of theory with ethnographic and experimental methods. We propose a research framework based on distributed cognition. Distributed cognition provides a reorientation of how we think about designing and supporting human computer interaction. It permits one to move boundary of the cognitive unit of analysis out beyond the skin of the indivdual to include the material and social environment as components of a larger cognitive system. This focuses attention on the processes by which people take advantage of both internal and external resources to organize their actions. For the design of workplaces, this means that work materials are more than stimuli for disembodied cognitive sytems. Work materials become elements of the cognitive system itself, and cognition becomes an emergent property of the interactions among people and work materials. We will apply our integrated approach to developing a distributed cognition based theory of annotation and explore a range of application domains: collaborative scientific research, education, and commercial aviation. In each domain, we will conduct ethnographic and experimental studies, design and implement digital work materials and analyze their effectiveness. In addition, to help us develop and communicate our distributed cognition perspective, we are developing: (1) a series of prototypes of history-enriched work materials that support collection and selective sharing of personnel and group activity histories and annotations, (2) annotation facilities to assist collaborations, and (3) information visualization facilities to exploit rich histories of interactions and provide effective access to annotations.

This planning grant serves to establish the basis for a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Software-Intensive Ultra-Large-Scale Systems. This proposed center will initially comprise of five research sites, at the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, the University of California San Diego, Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington. The research focus of this proposed center is on software for complex systems. The Center will conduct basic and applied research in traditional and emerging areas of software theory and practice, including research at the intersection of computer science and other disciplines, to include economics, cognition and anthropology. The research will address important problems and opportunities in six key areas: software language, software analysis and synthesis, software design, trustworthy software, software infrastructure and sentient software.

This project is exploring the integration of video and multiscale visualization facilities with computer vision techniques to create a flexible open framework to advance analysis of time-based records of human activity. The goals are to (1) accelerate analysis by employing vision-based pattern recognition capabilities to pre-segment and tag data records, (2) increase analysis power by visualizing multimodal activity and macro-micro relationships, and coordinating analysis and annotation across multiple scales, and (3) facilitate shared use of the developing framework with collaborators. Researchers from many disciplines are taking advantage of increasingly inexpensive digital video and storage facilities to assemble extensive data collections of human activity captured in real-world settings. The ability to record and share such data has created a critical moment in the practice and scope of behavioral research. The main obstacles to fully capitalizing on this scientific opportunity are the huge time investment required for analysis using current methods and understanding how to coordinate analyses focused at different scales so as to profit fully from the theoretical perspectives of multiple disciplines. Thus, any research using video or other time-based records in order to document or better understand human activity is a potential beneficiary of this research, and the long range objective is to better understand the dynamics of human activity as a scientific foundation for design.