Hélène Gaspard-Boulinc

Supporting air traffic control collaboration with a TableTop system

Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration.

The accident of flight AF447 Rio-Paris: a case study for HCI research

On 2009, June 1st, flight AF447 from Rio to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The safety and legal investigations have concluded that human factors played an important role in the accident. Observing that a number of elements from the report written by the French Office of Investigations for Civil Aviation Safety may be assimilated to known concepts from HCI, we propose to use the report as a case study for HCI research. After introducing the aeronautical vocabulary required to its understanding, we extract the HCI-related elements from the report, and assimilate, organize and translate them into conceptual frameworks from the Model of Action and Epistemology. We hope to foster further research aiming at a more formal modeling of the accident, or to foster the identification of possible improvements of the onboard systems.

Collaboration within the surgical suite: BoardProbe design for and with the surgical team

The expectations of computerizing hospitals are high, in the belief that it will improve health care quality, reduce costs, and increase administrative efficiency. However, effective computerization of hospitals is a real challenge. The explanations of this failure are typical of HCI misdesign. In this paper, we focus on the computer support of the activity within the surgical suite. Our research objectives are to understand the local activity at the DUNN Operating Rooms surgical suite of the Houston Methodist Hospital, propose a technological solution to instrument the staff activity, and deliver a design method and a toolkit to adapt our solutions to other hospitals.

The accident of flight 447 Rio-Paris: a case study for HCI research

On June 1st, 2009 flight AF447 from Rio to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The safety and legal investigations concluded that human factors have played an important role in the accident. Observing that a number of elements from the report written by the French Office of Investigations for Civil Aviation Safety may be assimilated to known concepts from HCI, we propose to use the report as a case study for HCI research. After introducing the aeronautical vocabulary required to its understanding, we extract the HCI-related elements from the report, and assimilate, organize and translate them into conceptual frameworks from the Model of Action and Epistemology. We hope to foster further research aiming at a more formal modeling of the accident, or to foster the identification of possible improvements of the onboard systems.

Usability Insights for Requirements Engineering Tools: A User Study with Practitioners in Aeronautics

Requirements Engineering plays a crucial role in coordinating the different stakeholders needed for safe aeronautics systems engineering. We conducted a qualitative study, using interviews and mockups, with fifteen industrial practitioners from four aeronautics companies, in order to investigate what tasks are actually performed by requirements engineers and how current tools support these tasks. We found that RE-specific tools constrain engineers to a rigid workflow, which is conflicting with the adaptive exploration of the problem. Engineers often start by using general-purpose tools to foster exploration and collaborative work with suppliers, at the expense of traceability. When engineers shift to requirements refinement and verification, they must use RE-specific tools to grant traceability. Then, the lack of tool usability yields significant time loss and dissatisfaction. Based on scenarios of observed RE practices and walkthrough, we formulate usability insights for RE-specific tools in order to conciliate flexibility and traceability throughout the RE process.

Analysis of the attitude indicator for the ab-initio aircraft pilot training

The attitude indicator is used during the ab-initio aircaft pilot training to quantify the angles of pitch and bank with a required precision or acceptable limits. An electronic version of this instrument, the Primary Flight display (PFD), is becoming available to any pilot, trainee or amateur, in visual flight conditions. With the help of descriptive models of interfaces, we analyse different types of representation for a task of turn maneuver and constant pitch. We find that the current PDFs do not ease this task.