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[Colloquium] Towards provably correct design of human-automation systems: Hybrid system observability and reachability

April 18, 2013

Watch Colloquium: 

M4V file (730 MB)

  • Date: Thursday, April 18, 2013 
  • Time: 11:00 am — 12:30 pm 
  • Place: Mechanical Engineering 218

Meeko Oishi
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico 

In many complex cyber-physical systems, human interaction with coupled cyber and physical components can significantly complicate system safety. Such systems are often large enough that simple intuition is not enough to determine whether the user-interface, a device that both provides information to the user about the underlying automation and allows the user to issue input commands to the system, as well as the corresponding automation, is correctly designed. Consider, for example, automation surprises and other mode errors that can occur in flight management systems, despite extensive simulation and experimental testing. We propose the development of observability and reachability techniques to create a new level of confidence and reliability in safety- critical cyber-physical systems, by predicting, at the design stage, configurations under which failures might occur. Observability techniques can determine whether the user has adequate information to accomplish a known task; reachability techniques can prevent the system from reaching configurations known a priori to be unsafe. Such control theoretic techniques could form the basis of design aids for provably correct human-automation systems.

 

Bio: Meeko Oishi is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. She received the Ph.D. (2004) and M.S. (2000) in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University (1998). Her research interests include hybrid control theory, control of semi-automated systems, reachability analysis, nonlinear systems, and control-based modeling of Parkinson’s disease. She is the recipient of a Peter Wall Institute Early Career Scholar Award, the Truman Postdoctoral Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineering, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the John Bienkowski Memorial Prize, Princeton University. She has been a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies, and a visiting researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, Honeywell Technology Center, and Sandia National Laboratories.