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CAREER: Belief Formation in Verification Strategies and the Evaluation of Verification Evidence

职业：验证策略信念的形成和验证证据的评估

基本信息

批准号：
2205468
负责人：
Alejandro Salado
金额：
$ 50万
依托单位：
University of Arizona
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-10-01 至 2025-07-31
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2205468&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
CAREER Belief Formation Verification Strategies

项目摘要

In systems engineering, verification is the process of building confidence in the proper functioning of a system. Although it is a key activity in engineering, the fundamentals of how engineers utilize objective data to inform inherently subjective judgments about the system during verification is not well understood. This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award supports fundamental research into this process and education efforts geared towards improving understanding about and skills for verification activities. The research focus is on modeling the information structures by which engineers build confidence in a system's performance. This knowledge can lead to improved verification strategies and more rigorous ways to evaluate verification data. Hence, the research activities can bring about a potentially transformative paradigm for the practice of systems engineering. Improved verification strategies benefit society by enabling efficient system development with a more robust verification coverage, which may lead to increased safety and efficacy of commercial products and public services and greater overall economic competitiveness. The innovative education paradigm introduced in this project embeds verification into regular engineering assignments to prepare students to exercise sound judgement and be effective decision makers in engineering. Middle school students are engaged with a computer game that teaches conceptual diversity beyond calculations. By realizing that no single answer exists for an engineering problem, students embrace the potential diversity in engineering solutions and focus on understanding how prior knowledge, mental models, preferences, and team member attitudes shape the meaningfulness of their solutions. The research objective of this CAREER project is to study the formation of engineers' beliefs during systems engineering verification activities and to identify patterns and heuristics that better enable engineers to capture their beliefs in information artifacts. Explanatory models of how engineers' beliefs form will be established by combining Bayesian analyses, traditional and dynamic belief graphs, and decision theory with empirical observations of professional engineers and information artifacts (e.g., verification plans and reports). Cognitive mapping will be used to elicit belief structures, Bayesian analysis will be employed to model engineers' beliefs, and Credal sets will be used to account for differing engineers' beliefs. The educational objective of this project is to help students recognize and embrace the subjective (yet non-arbitrary) nature of correctness in engineering problems. Novel instructional approaches to two key populations for engineering will be implemented and assessed. A digital game to model real-world contexts as math word problems will be used to seek and capture the conceptual diversity that emerges when middle school students cooperate while solving problems. Undergraduate students will be exposed to open-ended problems that foster a solution-verification iterative approach to engineering in several courses from their freshmen to senior years. Overall, this project will contribute to determining the effects of engineers' beliefs and belief structures on verification strategies and the evaluation of verification evidence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在系统工程中，验证是建立对系统正常功能的信心的过程。虽然它是工程中的关键活动，但工程师如何在验证期间利用客观数据来告知关于系统的固有主观判断的基本原理并没有得到很好的理解。该教师早期职业发展计划（Career）奖支持对这一过程的基础研究，以及旨在提高对验证活动的理解和技能的教育努力。研究的重点是建模信息结构，工程师通过这些信息结构建立对系统性能的信心。这些知识可以导致改进的验证策略和更严格的方法来评估验证数据。因此，研究活动可以为系统工程的实践带来潜在的变革范例。改进的验证策略通过使有效的系统开发具有更强大的验证覆盖范围，从而使社会受益，这可能导致商业产品和公共服务的安全性和有效性增加，以及更大的整体经济竞争力。在这个项目中引入的创新教育模式将验证嵌入到常规的工程作业中，使学生能够在工程中进行正确的判断并成为有效的决策者。中学生们正在玩一款电脑游戏，该游戏教授了计算之外的概念多样性。通过认识到工程问题不存在单一的答案，学生们拥抱工程解决方案的潜在多样性，并专注于理解先验知识、心理模型、偏好和团队成员态度如何塑造他们解决方案的意义。这个CAREER项目的研究目标是在系统工程验证活动中研究工程师信念的形成，并识别模式和启发式，使工程师能够更好地捕获他们在信息工件中的信念。通过将贝叶斯分析、传统的和动态的信念图、决策理论与专业工程师和信息工件（如验证计划和报告）的经验观察相结合，将建立工程师信念形成的解释模型。认知映射将被用来引出信念结构，贝叶斯分析将被用来建模工程师的信念，凭证集将被用来解释不同工程师的信念。该项目的教育目标是帮助学生认识并接受工程问题中正确性的主观（但非任意）本质。新的教学方法，以两个关键人群的工程将实施和评估。一个模拟现实世界情境的数字游戏将被用来寻找和捕捉中学生在合作解决问题时出现的概念多样性。从大一到大四，本科生将在几门课程中接触到开放式问题，这些问题培养了解决方案-验证迭代方法。总的来说，这个项目将有助于确定工程师的信念和信念结构对验证策略和验证证据评估的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。