Projects

To give you a flavour of the type of work I do here is a collection of past and present projects.

ISSUE: Integrated Spatial decision support Systems for Urban Emergencies (2009 - 2011)

Funded by STIC-Asie, the project brings together computer scientists, geophysicists and remote sensing specialists from Vietnam, China, Japan and France in order to investigate building spatial decision support systems for natural disasters in urban areas. Coordinated by Alexis Drogoul, IRD IFI/MSI, I am involved as the PI for MAGMA-LIG looking at human behaviour modelling in disaster situations.

Cognitive Complexity and Error in Critical Care (CEC) (2007 - 2012)

The project is funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and is coordinated by Vimla L. Patel, director of the Center for Decision Making and Cognition at Arizona State University. I am involved as one of the European collaborators. This multidisciplinary project is concerned with with modelling complexity and errors in critical care (emergency medicine and intensive care) environments. The project's approach emphasizes the cognitive properties of the “system” within which the error occurs and the notion of distributed cognition. Further information on the project is available from the CEC Project website. The main themes of the project are:

to develop models of complexity and distributed cognition and to use them to develop intervention strategies to predict and prevent future error.
to develop team training protocols, simulators and on-the-job tools to aid in prevention of medical error.
to develop a robust theoretical model of error that incorporates concepts derived from the study of complex systems, distributed cognition, and medical error.

Complexity in Social Science (COSI) (2000 - 2004)

COSI was an EC funded TMR Network (Framework 5), involving 8 European partners and two non-European partners. My previous research team (GRIC-IRIT) was coordinator of this project and in addition to working as a researcher I was also project manager. The goal of the COSI Project was to understand and model socio-cognitive processes in the context of real organisational systems. The main themes of the project were:

Complexity
Socio-organisational systems
Modelling and Simulation (predominately using an agent-based approach)

Cooperative Technologies for Complex Work Settings (COTCOS) (1996 - 2000)

COTCOS was another EC funded TMR Network involving 8 European partners. Again, GRIC-IRIT was the project coordinator. The overall goal of the COTCOS Projectwas to develop cooperative technologies. The central concerns were how:

to facilitate productivity of groups of people, co-located or based at geographically dispersed locations,
to share more easily information among distributed workgroups,
to enable distributed decision-making for high risk situations to be carried out effectively,
to develop computer supported 'organisational memory' systems that can provide better resources than those which currently exist for accessing, sharing and using information when needed in dynamic work situations.

Interculturalité, usages et conception des NTIC(2004 - 2005)

The 'Cultural Design' Project was nationally funded as a Specific Action in the Pluridisciplinary Thematic Network - RTP 32 (Action Specifique dans le cadre du Reseau Thematique Pluridisciplinaire STIC - Ergonomie, Usage, Acceptabilite). The focus of the Cultural Design project was on understanding cultural differences with respect to the use and design of IT applications. The work concerned three themes:

how cultural differences affect the design of interactive applications (such as websites, mobile devices, etc.)
how cultural differences of indigenous people or minority groups impact on their use of IT applications,
what is the impact of cultural differences on safety critical or high risk systems (e.g. nuclear power plants, air traffc control systems).

At this time I was working as an invited researcher at IIHM LIG and this team along with GRIC-IRIT who were also in the project was involved involved the first of the above research themes.

Crisis Management, Emergency Response, and Training (ongoing)

A lot of my work has been concerned with the domain of crisis management, emergency response and training and I am very involved with the ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) Community. Due to recent events, emergency and crisis situations have gained more attention from the research community. It is very difficult to plan for an efficient response in such situations since they are all, to some extent, different (due to variations in local conditions, etc) and they always involve the human factor, which cannot be anticipated. Top down formal procedures and centralised control often fail and we find that local, decentralised control is often more efficient in the short term. I am interested in understanding more about such situations and how we can design more effective response systems. In this work I draw upon complex systems theory and use an agent based systems approach for modelling and simulation and I have developed, or co-developed, several agent based simulations. I have also been involved in developing a mixed virtual reality exnvironment for training fire-fighters. My interests in this area are basically:

modelling patterns of interactions between stakeholders,
understanding the micro-macro relationship between 'local' cognitive activities and persistent organisational structures,
designing robust socio-technical (also understanding the factors which makes a system robust),
analysing collaborative processes and how people adjust their behaviours to unexpected situations,
how emotions affect decision making and what is the role of non-verbal communication.

Analysing and Modelling shared context in order to design home technologies (InSitu) (2005 - 2008)

The InSitu project is funded by EDF (Electricité de France) and concerns analysing and modelling domestic activities (i.e. what people do in the home). The ultimate goal is to help to design ambient technologies which are context sensitive and which really fit with our needs (rather than just inventing technically impressive gizmos which never fulfil people's needs). Therefore we look at ethnomethodological studies of the home. Later in the project we will try to assess the effect of technologies in domestic settings through agent-based computer simulation. Central themes in this work are the role of context, communication patterns and routines (how routines are constructed and how they are interwoven with technologies distributed around the home, what are the resources that people use in their domestic activities, how do people employ artefacts - both technological and 'non-technological', how do they organise their domestic space to support these activities, etc.).