ESCRITOIRE2 · Distributed crisis management using remote collaboration technologies
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2006-10-01 → 2009-09-30
- EU contribution
- €251,837
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- OIF
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Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - ESCRITOIRE2 (Distributed crisis management using remote collaboration technologies)
In this Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship, Dr Mark Ashdown spent two years at the Humans and Automation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Unites States, and one year at Thales Research and Technology in Reading, United Kingdom. He investigated asymmetric synchronous collaboration for distributed teams by creating a system that links tabletop and handheld displays to allow information sharing, particularly within emergency response teams. A person in a command centre uses a large tabletop display to arrange information such as maps, timelines, and reports, and these are shared in real time with teammates in the field who have small handheld devices. These devices allow conventional voice communications to be augmented with sharing of visual information. Various experimental user-interface features have been implemented. These include linked tabletop and handheld displays, telepointers for gesturing, visibility regions to aid awareness of what other users are seeing, a timeline representation for pending tasks, sketch input for entering routes on a map, and remote control of the handheld displays from the tabletop. Findings include the following. Users preferred to have the extra collaboration features. The gesturing features resulted in increased deictic gesturing between people. People used various strategies for guiding one another and filling in reports collaboratively, which can inform the design of future systems. Remote viewing of the handheld display was deemed useful, but remote control of it was a source of confusion. As team size was increased, field personnel were given more autonomy and relied more on the software tools they were given. The implementation prompts the development of a data storage and transmission system that is tailored to synchronous collaboration, and is more general that the conventional audio and video channels of a videoconference.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In a world where the threat of terrorism and environmental disasters are on the increase it is imperative that our ability to instantly collaborate, decide on a course of action and respond, improve dramatically. This proposal addresses this need by combining the remote collaboration technology capability developed by the researcher with the human supervisory control expertise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Traditional command structures in this domain follow a rigid hierarchy but wit h the widespread adoption of ubiquitous computing facilities by emergency personnel the communication structure can be re-evaluated.This project will therefore address the support of lateral relationships between operators in a crisis management setting b y using the novel desk-based remote collaboration systems called the Escritoire to support distributed decision making and human supervisory control (HSC). The researcher in this proposal developed the Escritoire during his PhD which was funded by Thales Research and Technology (TRT) and inspired TRT to set up a team of industrial researchers in this field, the Virtual Collaboration Solutions (VCS) group, located in the UK on the campus of the University of Surrey.In this project the researcher will spend two years in the USA at MIT's Humans and Automation Lab (HAL) learning about, and applying his technology to, HAL's core research field: decision making and HSC. During his time at HAL the researcher will maintain close liaison with the VCS group and after 2 years move to the UK to incorporate his new knowledge in Thales' crisis management test bed, share knowledge in the VCS team and present his results throughout Europe.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THALES RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY (UK) LIMITED · WEYBRIDGECoordinatorCity levelUnited Kingdom
- MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · CAMBRIDGEUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union