Jiri Vasek

The Crew Workload Manager An Open-loop Adaptive System Design for Next Generation Flight Decks

This paper presents an open loop adaptive system intended to address workload imbalances in future, high-workload flight decks. Air traffic in Europe is expected to more than double by 2020. New technologies being proposed will significantly add to pilot roles and responsibilities, and has the potential to add further periods of high workload to pilot operations. The CAMMI (Cognitive Adaptive Man Machine Interface) program addresses human factors priorities in the aviation domain by developing concepts that balance operator workload, support added future operator roles and responsibilities and resulting new task and information requirements, while allowing operators to focus on the most safety critical tasks. The Crew Workload Manager (CWLM) is a research prototype that objectively measures, compares, and displays the workload between pilots, and can recommend task sharing or automate lower order tasks as necessary. It is expected that the CWLM will minimize the time pilots spend in unbalanced workload conditions, and thereby reduce errors and pilot fatigue, and improve crew resource management. An evaluation plan is outlined that utilizes the novel Shared Aviation Task Battery.

Design Towards AI-Powered Workplace of the Future

The advances of technology have profoundly improved the way people live and work. However, accompanying fast-paced technological development is information overload, which can minimise our capacity for cognitive processing and our ability to make quality decisions. We conducted extensive user research to identify needs and problems of contemporary office workers. Based on the insights of these real needs, the concept of a system called Cognitive Hub has been developed which supports an activity-based new metaphor for work, user state adaptation, smart enterprise search, smart transformation between physical and digital contents and multimodal interaction. Konica Minolta is thus developing Cognitive Hub as a platform that will serve as a nexus for users’ information flows within the digital workplace. Cognitive Hub will also provide AI-based services to improve work experience and the well-being of office workers. A demonstrator was created to show the concept in action and illustrate its benefits and value for users.