GROUPER | grouperlab

September 5, 2016

Back to School

The Labor Day holiday weekend is drawing to a close, and I have finished up my second week of the Fellowship. Even though the start dates of the semester and my tenure here in DC were the same, I have gotten to notice how much the routines differ between the two environments. Unlike my academic routine that can adapt and adjust based on the day of the week and the differences between class and no-class, committee and research schedules, things feel distinct here. There is a bus I catch, most days, between 8:14 and 8:40. On Wednesdays, there will usually be lunch with the other Fellows. There are Monday and Thursday morning “huddle” meetings.

However, that is not what I notice the most from the past two weeks. I admit that I have developed a particular appreciation for my manager. Each day, there is a specific new thing I have to learn. How do I send a particular type of email? What is the formatting for this kind of documentation? Who do I contact for this activity? Of course, he’s seen this all before, but it’s my first time. And it’s not like I have had 3-4 weeks of easing into the situation. I’ve already worked on international memoranda, and meetings between embassy staff and local representatives, and sat in on planning discussions with the offices of some folks whose name might appear on someone’s bumper sticker. (But notably, the importance of the office is communicated by an acronym, or even a single letter; the people whose names are used are names I don’t recognize, and even those names go with acronyms.) The most appropriate phrase for this experience is one that I learned during my first few weeks as an undergrad at MIT: “Drinking from the firehose.”

In that environment, where I’m supposed to come up to speed quickly, it seems like a luxury to have someone check in with me as many as 3-5 times per day to help me with one task or another. In truth, some of the help sessions seem a bit remedial, teaching me things I do already know. But he doesn’t know that. And more importantly, I don’t always know when something I think I know how to do isn’t exactly how this organization does it. So, I find myself learning to be more patient when being taught, and listening all the way through the lesson. I even have a guiding document for goals to achieve over the next month or so—distinct from a to-do list of tasks, and an in-process list of assignments.

One of the things that surprises me most about this firehose experience is a new-found empathy and appreciation for the situations that confront new students in the lab. We’ve been working on SoS and PoSE conceptualizations of ICT use in the SHARK and DOLPHIN and PERCH* streams for years—why are you nodding blankly at me? Of course. I’ve been doing it for years. You just got here. I just used a bunch of acronyms—shorthand for me, incomprehensible jargon for you. Even when we get to time for a thesis outline, or a prelim draft, or a set of PhD defense slides, it does take some reminders to recognize that two dozen years of practice and 75 or more iterations don’t get transmitted easily to someone who is experiencing it all new and in an intense, nervous state.

I would like to hope that this lesson comes back to Purdue with me next Fall. For a new student, or new faculty member, each new item can be part of an overwhelming onslaught of novelty and complexity. Maybe it won’t stay that way for long, but it feels like that now. In the senior capstone design course I teach, I remind the students to take the time to capture those initial moments of novelty and first attempts at processing and decision making, because it will be really hard to recall those feelings (and assumptions, and senses of confusion) again later. I can tell them that, but it was a long time since I have felt that at the level I feel it now. It’s good to be reminded of what the first few, chaotic weeks of new experience feel like.

Photo of Little Kern Golden Trout by Middleton and Liitschwager (1988), hanging in the C Street entrance lobby of the National Academies.

*Acronym decluttering:

SoS: Systems-of-Systems. or a description of complex systems engineering settings where individual components of an overarching system represent complex systems in their own right (such as individual aircraft, with pilots and co-pilots, in the airspace over Washington, DC while Marine One is traveling across town).

PoSE: Perspectives on Systems Engineering. This is a course that I developed to teach about four distinct traditions of systems engineering, ranging across systems thinking, cybernetics, component-whole relations, and project management. Only in its second iteration as a hybrid distance / on-campus course, it is one of the most subscribed courses in Engineering Professional Education (and I’m not even teaching it this semester).

ICT: Information and Communications Technology. When I first started as a faculty member, most computers had line-by-line display screens in single colors of amber or green; email and word processors and bulletin board chat groups were the most sophisticated information exchange tools available. Even with all of the changes in capability, it’s still important to recognize that the point of these technologies were, and are, for humans to communicate.

SHARK, DOLPHIN, PERCH: These are designations of project areas within the research lab, referring to knowledge sharing architectures, information flow delays, and applications to healthcare delivery improvement, respectively. Check them out at https://engineering.purdue.edu/GrouperLab/streams/.

February 17, 2014

Timing is Everything

Although it doesn’t always feel like it here in the lab, things are actually going very well. The work calendar is quite full, and the project to-do lists continue to grow—not just in the number of items, but in the number of projects which require to-do items. Three different Institutional Review Board (IRB) applications, with three different students. Four research projects active, with two or three more coming on line. The “March Madness” travel schedule I had last year is even worse: the lab has now officially declared it “Winter Madness” (from January 24 until March 14, there is only one week where I am not in an airport on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday of that weekend—and on March 21-24, I will be driving back from Chicago on Friday, and flying again on Monday).

Last Thursday, though, I was able to appreciate what some good timing could achieve. A day earlier, I had escaped from the ice and snow storm that paralyzed the Southeast US: leaving out of western Virginia early Wednesday morning, on a rebooked flight through Detroit (all flights through Atlanta had been cancelled as of Monday evening). I was only a few hours later arriving home than originally scheduled, even with delays and flight diversions (let’s hear it for multiple daily nonstops from Detroit to Indianapolis!). Thursday was bright, clear, and even relatively “warm” (about 5F that morning, with a high temperature of approximately 30F) for a drive down to Bloomington, IN for a research meeting. That research meeting was in support of one of our new grants, a project with the Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) to look at sensemaking, distributed expertise, and information presentation in cyberinfrastructure network operations centers. The meeting was unexpectedly effective in highlighting both people to talk to and additional directions for the research to pursue. A positive attitude to go down on the one nice day where my schedule permitted the trip was better than putting the trip off for later (given “Winter Madness” and the frequency of airspace-paralyzing storms, I am not thrilled about trying to create new one-day visits anytime before April). At the end of the day, I even received one more treat derived from an awareness of good timing. As I left the office, the nearly full moon was visible to the east, while the International Space Station was a fast-moving evening star traveling from northwest to northeast. (No, I don’t have the orbital tracks memorized, but there are NASA websites and software apps for that.) Yeah, that was some good timing.

Timing is a fairly popular subject of GROUPER research, even if there’s only been a couple of blog entries highlighting time pressure (and only one on time perception). But the topic is never far from our mind. In our direct research investigations, we talk about the sense of time pressure as the ratio of time required to complete a task to the time available to complete it (T_R / T_A), with time pressure increasing as you run out of time to finish faster than you run out of task to complete. We worry about the challenge of the age and “freshness” of data when making decisions about the current state of a dynamic world (and what you need to do based on that state). We consider how experts trade other resources for time, including the decision to create an interim solution (“safe mode”) to stabilize a degrading system to allow for more time to consider a better, more stable recovery and repair. But how does that play out in the lab’s daily activities, other than a posting an ongoing (and continuing growing) list of deadlines?

Fortunately, we have been working on a set of very promising solutions (processes, really). As I go through my travel schedule, the students get a strong sense of the “windows of opportunity” (time periods of available work capacity) where I can respond to a task request or help them make progress towards an external deadline. A few months ago, I described some of my thought process in working in a distributed way on these tasks; I think in terms of a set of scaled answers to the student’s question. In essence, my thought process and general formulation goes like this:

Student: Dr. C., I need you to do xyz by time T_D.

(If (T_D – Now) is under 12 hours, I tend to get really upset. Don’t do that.)

BSC: What do I need in order to do xyz?

Student: You need A, B, and Q.

(If I don’t have A, B, or Q, and the student doesn’t provide it at the time of the request, I tend to get really upset, Don’t do that.)

Then I usually try to provide one of a set of answers, ranging from:

NO.
Not by T_D; the best I can do is T_alt.
I can do xyz’ by T_D.
I can do that, but can’t start until T_S.
Yes, working
DONE.

What I didn’t expect was how providing this type of information to the students could actually change the style of interactions in lab. It’s not that I declared some specific required email format, or that I would refuse to read emails that did not conform to that format. But, within a week or two, I started noticing emails with subject lines including the words:

ACTION REQUIRED / REQUESTED, or

INFORMATION ONLY.

The body of the emails would specify details like:

Estimated time to complete: xxx

Date / time needed: dd mmm yy hh:mm

So, rather than simply complying with a command, the students now understand my motivations, and my constraints, and my strategies for organizing my time. I also pointed out that I try to set aside windows of time in advance for everyone—not just in the weekly 1:1 meetings (which, I confess, is much harder to achieve during the Winter Madness travel), but when I expect tasks towards external deadlines. Knowing in advance how much time to set aside helps me with schedules, and allows for slipping in new tasks on an emergency or opportunistic basis. It’s all part of a goal of “Better Information Now” that we have worked with in our projects with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the United Space Alliance. Sometimes, it works very well, and sometimes it still needs adjustment and improvement. But at least, we’re making progress.

It’s about time.

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January 9, 2014

Who’s Your Team?

(After a recent entry entitled, They Got Game, you might think that this is turning just into a sports blog. I promise: neither that entry nor this one is only, or even primarily, about sports.)

After a glut of sporting festivity, the college football bowl season and first round of NFL playoffs are now history. (Because of the winter storm and “polar vortex” that deposited 10 in / 25 cm of snow, followed by temperatures of -22F / -30C, my satellite receiver has been offline since midday Sunday. Supposedly, there was a fairly entertaining football game on Monday evening. I hope someone enjoyed it.) People who know me know that I’m a fairly intense sports fan, and I have followed both college and professional football (and college women’s basketball) for most of my life. I have also lived in a number of locations and developed attachments to quite a few teams. (I’m going to assume that at least a few current or alumni GROUPERs were pretty pleased with the outcomes of the Rose and Orange Bowls.) So, it’s not surprising when I’m asked, Who’s your team?

This was an interesting philosophical question put to me by a close friend while we were watching one or another of the various games. It became a philosophical question when it was pointed out to me that I was getting more upset at the commentary by the announcers than who was actually winning on the field. It’s understandable to be disappointed when the team you’re rooting for is losing. However, my friend pointed out that I was annoyed even when I wasn’t cheering specifically for one of the two teams playing on the field. Suddenly, I realized that this might not just be about sports. Fortunately, my friend and I prefer very analytical discussions, so we started to analyze it. When I have a team that I feel an affiliation to (I consider them a version of “us”), I want them to win. (If I don’t have an affiliation to the other team, I am perfectly thrilled to have “us” win by a large margin, in what might otherwise be seen as a poor matching of teams.) But more importantly, I want the game to be exciting and entertaining. I want the officiating to be consistent, appropriate, and responsive to the rules as they are currently in place. (Like many fans, I comment about the officiating. However, I also will frequently observe the penalty and announce both the penalty and penalized player, before the referee does so. Did I mention I’ve been an intense fan for a long time?) I don’t like it when the official misses calls. But I will frequently accept that “we” had a bad play instead of always assuming a “bad ref” when a penalty is called against “us”. Why is this? If I want the referees to do their job appropriately (without bias or favoritism), I feel obliged to acknowledge and “own” our errors as well. I respect good announcers who point out important elements of the game play. However, I found myself profoundly upset when an announcer would shift from one bias to another just based on the most recent event, using general references that they’ve heard as “it’s generally known” or “everybody thinks that”… (Using trite catchphrases, especially with wrong or mixed metaphors, will always draw specific ire from me.)

This suggests that there is another level of affiliation going on; this other affiliation applies both to the active participation in research at GROUPER and the spectator role for a football game. It’s not just about sportsmanship, although that’s part of it. Let’s call it the search for The Better Rule, Well Applied (BRWA). As you know, academics have their rankings, the equivalent of the Coaches’ Top 25 poll. The analogy is pretty strong: the rankings for the top US IE graduate programs are voted on by the department heads of those IE programs. So, I can be excited or upset that Purdue is #10. But wait. Let’s look at MIT, ranked #3. I have an affiliation with MIT, so I should see them as “us,” right? They don’t have any degree program called Industrial Engineering. How about Stanford or Cornell? Great universities. But there are more people in human factors in Purdue IE than at the corresponding programs (again, not all IE) in those three universities combined. They don’t do IE human factors. This issue challenges how we might use the rankings. I’m actually less concerned about our actual ranking than the distortion. Hence, this is an issue of BRWA, not just whether we’re better than the (logically nonexistent) competition at a specific other department.

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of students trying to pick their dissertation topics. Some of the topics were exotic; others were relatively mundane. However, I am concerned at how often a topic is considered unworthy because there’s not enough funding in that area. “Well, you need to compete for, and obtain, competitive grant funding. You need to show your colleagues at the highly ranked programs how much money you’re bringing in, and place your students at those programs.” But hold on, my BRWA affiliation screams. The program at XYZ university doesn’t, and won’t, have an opening in human factors. My student would rather work in (and is better suited towards) industry or government than a research academic position. Isn’t graduate training about seeking out creative and innovative solutions that push the frontiers of knowledge and understanding? Isn’t the PhD supposed to be about supporting the student’s career development, more than mine—in other words, preparing them for what suits them, and appropriately emphasizing their strengths towards their best fitting pathway?

Sometimes, it feels like it is playing a different sport. Some football folks talk about “winning at all costs”; others talk about integrity and sportsmanship. They’re supposedly playing the same game, but in reality, they’re not. In sports, and in research, maybe I’m not just playing for “winning”. It feels like I’m playing for Truth. In the lab, what sport are we playing? Which “Game” do we need to bring? My sport seems to be University (knowledge, understanding, career preparation), and I want to be a starter—or even captain—on the special GROUPER squad on the BRWA team. Our team colors include Consent and Connection. …

This may not even be recognizable to other people. It could sound like I’m rooting for the Montana team in the NFL playoffs. (Um, not only is there no professional football team in state of Montana, there is no NFL team in any US state that borders on Montana. Alberta and Saskatchewan have Canadian Football League (CFL) teams. The CFL championship was played last November.) How do you recruit for a team in a sport that others might not even see as the right sport to be playing? Again, this is an interesting philosophical point. For instance, why is the team BRWA, instead of GROUPER? GROUPER can’t answer all questions, about all subjects—we specialize in human factors and systems engineering, and you need more than that to do well in University. These questions aren’t irrelevant to working at Purdue in IE, even if they seem to be ignoring “reality”. If we don’t ask the question, or consider the options, we never make our team or our sport better.

(By the way, the 2013 CFL Grey Cup Most Valuable Player was Kory Sheets, who was a running back for Purdue.)

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October 22, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

Well, sometimes you get stuck on a theme. There have been several topics that have been at the forefront of my thinking over the past month, coming largely from the experience at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Although there were only two current GROUPERs there, I did get to interact with a number of former students, as well as others who sought me out and seemed truly eager to interact with me during the meeting. In that light, I thought about naming this entry, “Back from Cali”. However, after reading the song lyrics, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to reference the song by Slash (even though Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, is originally from Lafayette, IN). How about “Back to Cali”? No, the LL Cool J lyrics aren’t suitable either. Even becoming snarky didn’t help. “Title of the Entry” reminded me immediately of the song by DaVinci’s Notebook. So, yes, I am aware of a song reference above. Apparently, I can’t escape it.

So, what was so important that I now have all of this music in my head? Well, it was a great room, with a wonderful view, but it wasn’t just about the view, or even the boat.

One thing I noticed frequently is that the capacity for positive effect that one may have on others should not be trivialized. I’m not always aware of this, and the meeting in San Diego was a great reminder of the power of the effect. Three former GROUPERs (and one honorary GROUPER) are now involved with the Society in positions of leadership. Sandra Garrett is on the HFES Executive Council with me; members of the Technical Program Committee for 2013 included Michelle Rogers (Workshops) and Erik Wakefield (Product Design) as well as Ron Boring (Interactive Sessions and Posters). Let me mention Erik for a moment. When I first started working with him, he was working in the College of Technology, with what seemed to be a bizarre idea—let’s have sports scores and updates that can be pushed, real time, to someone’s mobile device. Except that this was 2005-06, before iPhone and Galaxy smartphones. He got the project done, graduated, got a job, and… developed. First in one company, then another, and then another, with HFES as his primary professional affiliation. He’s a senior engineer now, and working on some cool projects. When I saw him in San Diego, I noticed the difference, and mentioned it. And I said that I was proud of how he’d developed. Apparently, that had an effect—he went out of his way to mention it in one of his status updates (check on October 1, 2013). And that’s what got me thinking. We can have an effect that we don’t recognize, until someone points it out to us.

In my previous entry, “Eaten up with Curiosity,” I mentioned how much I was affected as an adolescent by the Rudyard Kipling story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Well, as it turns out, the Chuck Jones Gallery was just a few blocks away from the hotel, right in the midst of the Gaslamp District. I passed the gallery nearly every day, and Thursday evening, decided that I simply had to stop by. I confess that I took along a young colleague who had been expressing the desire and enjoyment of engaging in conversation and challenge; although it’s hard (and a bit arrogant) to simply wake up one morning to say, “I think I’m going to mentor that person today,” I did truly enjoy helping and encouraging them to consider their capability and career path from a variety of perspectives. So, in any case, we stopped by the Gallery, just for me to explore what might be there. And, behold, in one of the smaller rooms of the gallery, was a picture of Rikki. Actually, a production cel. A nice piece of animation history. So, there was a bit of passion expressed, moderated by a sense that such things were still beyond me.

Detail of Rikki cel. Copyright, Chuck Jones Entertainment

Who was Rikki? Just a pet? Or the hero of an epic confrontation, sung into history? Again, this is an entry about who we think we are. Sometimes we forget, or get stuck in a past version of who we might have been at some point in the past. I tend to call that past version “the ramen-eating guy in my head”. As an undergrad (and somewhat as a grad student), I was always watching every penny; once, when I found a $20 bill on the street in a puddle, I rejoiced—that was food for a month! This was someone desperate to show he could belong, that he could do something of note in the academic environment. Thirty years later, that ramen-eating guy still shows up sometimes. I have to remind myself that’s not where I am now. I have students eager to work with me. Former students greet me, and are thrilled to show me their new business cards. Others whom I never would have guessed knew about me seem honored to meet me; they’ve heard such wonderful stories about me. How I treat them now may not seem like much, but it can have a tremendous effect on their life and future. Who knows which young and eager student will become the next leader of our field?

These are lessons that I am very pleased to learn, with importance for my life both now and into the future. I thank all those who helped me with these insights and learnings.

Excuse me. I have to open a package from San Diego. It’s a reminder never to underestimate who we are. Rikki has arrived.

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January 12, 2013

Broad, Deep and Wide

Early Friday afternoon, I was riding back to the airport on the Metro Yellow Line in Washington, DC. Somewhere between L’Enfant Plaza and Crystal City stops, an older man looks at me and asks, “Are you a Boilermaker?”

“Yes, I’m on the faculty there.”

Much to my surprise, he reaches out to shake my hand. “I graduated from there… a long time ago.” He smiled as he got up, and then got off at his stop. I proceeded to look around at my bags, and noticed how he figured it out: my business card luggage tag was visible, with the Purdue University logo clearly showing. I was glad to know that seeing such a reference to his alma mater was a source of pleasure for this gentleman, and I do take those moments to reflect on the nature of the experience. As it turns out, it was the third interaction in less than 24 hours where someone sought me out for interaction due to the Purdue reference.

In the hotel lobby Thursday evening, I was introduced to the MS advisor of the IE Undergraduate Coordinator, Patrick Brunese. There was no mention of football, though Pat went to the University of Alabama. (You may recall that their football team won a particular football game earlier this week.) Instead, we talked about Pat’s interest in undergraduate IE education, and my attendance at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference. (I do intend to attend at least part of the conference, but I do have the challenge of also wanting to attend my daughter’s university graduation.) This morning, I had a discussion with a young faculty member who had heard of the interdisciplinary opportunities and sustained reputation of Purdue Engineering. When I mentioned the current effort of the College to increase the faculty size by 30% in the next five years, and the fact that she could find interested colleagues in Biomedical, Electrical, and Industrial Engineering (along with opportunities in the College of Science), she was hooked, and even grateful to me for taking the time to speak with her about it. I replied that I remember what it felt like to be “young, hungry, and grateful,” and wanted to provide whatever advice and mentorship I could.

I admit that when I was at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico earlier this week, there was some sports talk. But I was there for a formal talk and project work, including discussions regarding monitoring and procedure checking / validation tasks, and processes of distributed knowledge coordination and knowledge sharing.

These are examples of a more focused connection, and part of the level of Purdue recognition that focuses on our engineering reputation. There are over 400,000 Purdue alumni, 80,000 Engineering alumni, and over 8,000 IE alumni… pretty large numbers overall. But it’s not just number, or breadth of reach: we seem to be overrepresented in various circles (such as NASA or NSF, Sandia National Labs, or the “C-suites” of various companies) where I might interact. So, I continue a practice I learned long ago, and maintain the habits and rituals associated with Purdue representation (business cards, Block P pins, “Hail Purdue” mentions during formal presentations). We’re widely visible, and widely influential, as a university and engineering program. Why is this important for the GROUPER blog?

When we are doing our work, people notice, and take some notice of (and if they’re Purdue folks, maybe some pride in) it. They expect a Purdue person to be very good. As I say to the undergrads, the reputation that people know about and want to benefit from is borne on the shoulders of the history of past work and recognition. In my formal Sandia presentation, I talked about some of the prior GROUPER work in information alignment, root cause analysis, and event response. There were some very busy periods of note-taking, and challenging questions that not just addressed straightforward aspects of human error and performance shaping factors, but also more fundamental queries about the nature of complex system development, analysis, and evaluation. And of course, on every slide, there was the Purdue College of Engineering logo, the “Rethink IE” logo, and the GROUPER “data fish” logo.

Over the coming semester, we plan to increase our rate of posting—not just my various commentaries (once per month still seems the right rate for me), but to have other opportunities to highlight what is happening in the lab from a variety of sources. The goal is not actually just to broaden our discussion, but to address issues in a more focused way, from a variety of perspectives. Let’s see how that works.

Tag: GROUPER