Computer Vision News - June 2021

planes. My dad has videos of me when I was 4 years old talking about rocket ships. I would love to see that! [ laughs ] My parents really encouraged an early love of science and engineering. I remember watching the space shuttle launches when I was little, the Mars rover that landed in the 90s. I’ve always desired to be a part of developing new technologies that can expand our knowledge as humans. The other aspect that I really love about aerospace is that it has to be perfect! [ laughs ] I remember times when it did not work perfectly, and it was a disaster. Exactly! In my work currently, I specialize in human/machine collaboration and human/machine interaction for safety critical environments. Do you also fly airplanes? I worked on my pilot license while I was a grad student. I have flown airplanes. It’s not an everyday part of my life currently, but I think it’s important to understand how it really works, rather than just in the abstract. What does sometime go wrong, in terms of the interaction with humans and machines? I think there are interesting parallels between the challenges that we’ve had to address in aviation and pilot interaction with cockpit automation. There are lessons that we’ve had to learn the hard way about how to design human capabilities and machine capabilities to really fit together like a puzzle piece effectively. In aviation in the United States, we have one of the safest air transportation systems in the world. It’s through a lot of hard work and lessons learned the hard way. Every time you have a new generation of aircraft introduced, including things that you expect to make flying safer, you see a large spike in incidents and fatal accidents. One of the reasons we have been able, over the decades, to achieve such a safe air transportation system, is by honing the design of the human/machine as a system, rather than thinking about engineering technology as independent from human capability. If you think about what is happening in our world today, we have autonomous vehicles on our roads, sidewalk delivery robots, security guard robots… We have robots that go up and down our grocery stores looking for spills. None 327 Julie Shah The most wonderful part of being a researcher and being a professor is that it’s my daily job to be “wowed”