Collaboration at a Distance! TU Delft

What a great phrase from the researchers at TU Delft that captures a major aspect of emergency informatics: collaboration at a distance! Given that robots and embedded sensors provide a remote presence into places that people can’t get to (or get to quickly enough), the question is how to use it? Which leads to collaboration at a distance!

As we noted in a recent article (see ``From Remote Tool to Shared Roles," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, special issue on New Vistas and Challenges for Teleoperation, 15:4, Dec.08, pp. 39-49), the real human-robot ratio isn’t having 1 person controlling a 1,000 robots but rather having a 1,000 people be able to use the data from a robot, without necessarily knowing that it’s from a robot. And certainly those 1,000 people won’t all know each other and may be working independently (and at cross-purposes), which David Woods at Ohio State calls polycentric control. Plus in order to use the data, we expect some ad-hoc teams to form and that they will use the visual data as a common ground (as per Jenny Burke’s PhD).

I was at the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft) on Wednesday to attend Maarten van Zomeran’s MS defense, as I had been invited to serve on his committee. Maarten did a great job with the Rubbleviewer and his MS was well attended- I am very proud. His thesis was chock full of interesting information beyond the Rubbleviewer, including a comparison of US FEMA search methods and information representation with United Nations INSARAG. Maarten has participated in two full scale exercises, one with the Czech team and one with the Netherland team in an exercise in Dubai- plus with the responders at Disaster City. An amazing grounding for his work in better representations and visualization!

It also gave me an opportunity to meet in person the research team there- they don't focus on emergency response but that's becoming an area of interest. A lot of great work in artificial intelligence, HCI, and especially software agents. Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, head of Man Machine Interaction dept (and another right thinking woman!) proposed a way forward for continued work on the Rubbleviewer and collaboration in general. TJ de Greef was a great host (few things are better than great conversations over Dutch white beer in an outdoor plaza!) and I admire his industrial research expertise and research savvy. What a great group of people! Check out http://mmi.tudelft.nl/index.php

I sat in on a undergraduate student capstone project presentation and was impressed not only by the topic and competence, but also that it was delivered in perfect English.