CISE Postdoctoral Program: ES Postdoctoral Associate: Safety and the Human-Computer Interface

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9504064 Leveson Two aspects of the integration of HCI and safety research will be investigated in this work. The first area of research is the application of HCI techniques and knowledge to the design of formal specification languages---both their printed and automated representations. The concept of semantic distance for formal specification languages will be made operational and its implications in the design of such languages will be explored. The approach will involve working with application experts in building real specifications and using this experience to determine what features of specifications they find most natural, and exploring cognitive psychology models of human error and how they can be applied to specification languages to minimize the errors that are made. The second research topic involves modeling the HCI and performing a hazard analysis on the model. This work will involve modeling human behavior, developing analysis techniques to identify potential hazardous behavior of both the human operators and the computer, integrating these models into the general model for specification and analysis of critical system properties, and determining how the resulting information can be used in the design of the software and the design of user procedures. The subject of how current knowledge about the safe design of traditional controls can be applied to the design of computer-based models will be examined and experimental testbeds will be developed to test the hypotheses. ***