Professor Ivan Marsic has won a new NSF award for the project titled "Activity Recognition for Reducing Delays in Fast-Response Teamwork.” This is a four-year $1.2M collaborative effort led by Rutgers University (Ivan Marsic, PI) with Drexel University and Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Rutgers' share of this award is $700,000.
Human performance in time-critical teamwork settings relies on appropriate and timely task completion. Time perception, a critical cognitive function that influences team performance, is often skewed in these settings and is impacted by cognitive workload. This project will address timeliness errors by automatically and unobtrusively modeling and tracking cross-disciplinary task performance through analysis of verbal communication and the use of information artifacts. The resulting model will be used to display alerts about timeliness of critical tasks in a way that supports team members' information needs without increasing their cognitive workload. Novel techniques for activity recognition in fast-paced and crowded collaborative settings will be based on passive RFID, speech recognition, and computer vision, supplemented by other sensors and digital devices. The proposed research will develop (1) temporal models of verbal communication and digital document interaction during complex activities in fast-paced teamwork for the purpose of automatic activity recognition; (2) approaches for real-time recognition of over a hundred different activities in the presence of up to a thousand RFID tags; and (3) approaches for displaying delay information for rapid assimilation under high task load that learn from workers' responses to improve their usefulness to the team. Together, the work will provide building blocks for computerized support of teams not just in the trauma domain, but in other domains with complex, interleaved tasks such as surgery, traffic control, and disaster management.
You can find more details on the project at the NSF page here: https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1763827
Congratulations Ivan on this exciting collaborative effort!