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201-210 of 245 results

  • Air Traffic Controllers’ Occupational Stress and Performance in the Future Air Traffic Management

    PI Hui Wang

    CO-I Edward Mummert

    As demand for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations increases, it is vital to understand its effects on air traffic controllers and the safety of the national airspace system. This study’s primary purpose is to determine how UAVs that operate in controlled airspace would influence air traffic controllers’ occupational stress and performance. In a within-subject experimental research design, 24 participants sampled from a university’s undergraduate Air Traffic Management (ATM) program completed three different air traffic control (ATC) scenarios on an en-route ATC simulation system. The degree of UAV automation and control were varied in each scenario. The participants’ stress levels, performance, and workload were measured with both objective and subjective measurements. Within-subjects ANOVA tests showed significant effects on the participants’ stress level, performance, and workload when automated UAVs were present in the scenario. Participants experienced increased workload, the highest level of stress, and carried out the worst performance when with controllable UAVs in the airspace. These findings can inform UAV integration into controlled airspace and future research into UAV automation and control and ATC management. 

    Categories: Graduate

  • Safety Systems, Culture, and Passengers’ Willingness to Fly in Autonomous Air Taxis

    PI Kenneth Ward

    CO-I Scott Winter

    As city populations grow, the transportation industry plans to alleviate traffic congestion by introducing the urban air mobility (UAM) concept, in which small passenger and cargo aircraft augment metropolitan transportation networks. A key component of UAM is that of air taxis, which are on-demand air services for individuals and small groups. In addition, UAM companies are designing the aircraft to operate fully autonomously: The intent is for the vehicles to arrive and transport people from point to point without input from human pilots.



    In studies of passengers’ perceptions, researchers found that safety was among the top passenger concerns. The international market complicates the matter, as research indicates people from different nations differ in their willingness to fly in autonomous aircraft. Past research hypothesized that individuals’ cultural orientation, specifically their degree of individualism or communalism, was a factor of the differences in willingness to fly.

    A quantitative survey experiment in two studies was conducted to investigate willingness to fly in autonomous air taxis among people from the United States and India. The first study used a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial analysis to test the effects of nationality, automatic airframe parachute availability, and remote pilot system availability on willingness to fly. People from India were more willing to fly than people from the United States, and people in general were more willing to fly in an aircraft equipped with an automatic airframe parachute. The second study replicated the effects of the first and tested whether two aspects of cultural orientation mediated the relationship between safety system availability and willingness to fly. Cultural orientation was not found to significantly mediate the relationship among people from the United States or India.

    Categories: Graduate

  • Research and update SSCP Study Guide to 3d Edition

    PI Michael Wills

    Research current cybersecurity industry best practices, threat intelligence, and regulatory requirements, as part of publisher update for (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Professional Study Guide, 3d Edition

    Extensively revise the previous (2nd Edition) of this study guide to reflect cutting-edge best practices across the information security / cybersecurity market spaces. Research to support new content for operational technology (OT) security issues -- for IoT, process control, autonomous devices, smart buildings and vehicles, and even medical implants. Focus this on the security issues of IT-OT systems integrations, becoming far more commonplace in modern business in most industries. Adapt this to self-paced learning and ready reference format required in a study guide for individual and classroom use.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Experimental Academics in Action at ERAU (EAA-at-ERAU)

    PI Michael Wills

    EAA@ERAU: IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach that puts academic experimentation into action in ways that attract and engage both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.



    This project, inspired by my current activities as an Academic Innovation Research (AIR) Fellow, recognizes that it's all well and good to develop and trial innovative teaching, class design, or assessment techniques in a handful of classes; but it's quite another to get prospective students to come to ERAU, take such new and different courses, and have all benefit from the experiences.

    What's Needed: More of an experimental, "Skunk Works" life cycle approach to innovation in teaching.


    SUBMITTED as a proposal to the Academic Innovation 2023 Virtual Conference, Rothwell Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence.


    CONCEPT:

    Throughout the history of aviation, the "experimental mindset" has been the driving force behind the development of new approaches and ideas. Experimenters have transformed aviation time and time again.  Clearly, the vast majority of flights are anything but experimental; those flights have business needs to attend to, or mission objectives to accomplish.

    But that "test pilot" mindset, that experimenter view, is alive and well throughout the aviation and aerospace community across the world.   And the notion of going to an Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In event, like at Oshkosh, WI, excites every one of us.


    We at ERAU know this; it's in our blood.


    We just don't do this very well, if at all, with our classes or our teaching. Okay, yes, a few of us do innovate around the edges; we tweak approaches and try new tools and new techniques.


    Which none of our students ever find out BEFORE they walk into our classrooms, virtual or physical.


    IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach, that puts academic experimentation into action, in ways that attract the attention of both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.


    An EAA strategy for Worldwide needs to gently touch many different aspects of many different business processes here at Worldwide; processes that must be rock-solid, well-oiled and well-scaled for our production, mainline course deliveries, term after term.


    As a concept exploration and demonstration, this project will build on the AIR Fellows Program's approach to having a small handful of innovative "pilot" courses ready to launch in the coming calendar year as context, feasibility study, and as the test case to show that an EAA strategy is necessary (but not sufficient) for such innovations to have a chance of success.


    Challenging many of the conventional wisdom factors about the "current" "best" ways of doing our business of course development, production, teaching, and assessment, by placing those within a messaging strategy that disrupts hearts and minds without requiring a full-scale disruption of existing business, marketing, outreach, enrollment, advising, course production, teaching, and assessment processes.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Academic Innovation Research Fellowship Grant: Scaling Up the Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit

    PI Michael Wills

    Empirical evaluation of class design techniques that empower students to take creative, active, agile ownership of their learning, thus auto‐immunizing against accidental or deliberate academic integrity issues; scalable as a toolkit by other instructors in other disciplines across ERAU

    This project, funded by ERAU's AIR Fellowship Program, builds on several years of rapid prototyping and use of different innovative techniques, applied in different ways, in various courses that I have been teaching for ERAU over the past several years. Activity by activity, these flight tests of specific techniques illuminated the central concept of this project: that a better design approach for classroom activities, supported in agile ways by the instructor, can deliver four primary student-centric benefits:

    1. Liberate student creativity  -- turning them loose to creatively build their own problems, develop their own solutions, and test those solutions
    2. Concretely make the learning relevant to the students, grounded in reality
    3. Leading to increased feelings of empowerment by students, and of ownership of their own learning processes
    4. And have so much more fun while they’re doing it, that they simply have no incentive and many emotional disincentives to cheat, cut corners, or under-achieve

    Note the natural knock-on effect of these benefits on the faculty member: as students become more engaged with their learning, own their learning, and thereby reduce their potential for over-reliance on learning by copying (instead of critical reading for comprehension), they reduce the instructor’s time and effort spent chasing potential academic integrity violation (AIV) issues. As students have more fun doing better quality work, the instructor should be able to better enjoy the evaluation, feed-forward, and assessment aspects of their duties.

    These benefits amount to an inoculation or immunization of students that helps prevent them from committing academic integrity violations, for whatever reason; in doing so, this inoculation (or “creativity megavitamin treatment”) may also light fires under a student’s desires to create work that they want to be proud of, and can and should be proud of.

    The Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit (AIVT) refers to a set of design paradigms, frameworks, or models which encourage and support the development, deployment, and teaching of courses that target this goal.

    Project Plan

    This Project proposes to further develop these assertions so that they can be adopted and adapted by other faculty members into their own teaching and learning experiences. This will be accomplished by the following set of tasks:

    Task 1.Inventory, characterize, and assess early prototyping trials. I will go through classes I have taught during the last two years (approximate) in which I deployed and used one or more of the techniques I have been trialing in this regard. Characterization would, for example, attempt to identify whether a particular element was best suited for supporting foundational or prerequisite knowledge and skills development, guided inquiry, advanced concepts, or in other ways, as the data may suggest.  I will continue to enrich this data set from lessons learned from my ongoing teaching throughout the AY.

    Task 2.Identifying candidate “meta-models” of AIVT elements. This seeks to develop a consistent meta-description of such elements, to facilitate their development as containerized, redeployable courseware elements.

    Task 3.Focused, limited query and research as needed, when aspects of the project need greater support from either a theoretical or a practical perspective.

    Task 4.Curating and hosting the Project, its concepts, frameworks, paradigms, and the AIVT, in a fashion that facilitates sharing, collaboration, and use by other ERAU faculty members as and when appropriate.  Notionally, this would be in a newly-created Canvas course that I would build and use for this purpose.

    Expected Impacts.

    At the individual level, I see the project as making my own style of renovate-as-I-teach more scalable and sustainable. It will provide me with better mental models and concepts for how I go about my preparation for teaching each new class; its toolkits and elements should make my job of tuning, pruning, updating, or pivoting activities within each class I teach, each time I teach it, easier and more repeatable.

    The experience of this project will also give me greater insight as to whether these concepts, ideas, tactics, and techniques have subject domain – specific characteristics of note.

    Sharing these findings and experiences with the broader ERAU faculty and course design communities can lead to many benefits:

    • Improved student engagement leads to greater student success
    • Faculty engagement with students becomes more enjoyable as it becomes more supportive and effective
    • As courses become more agile, an academic discipline or degree program can be more agile and responsive in meeting rapidly-evolving real-world situations
    • All of which can enhance the University’s reputation, standing, effectiveness, and enrollments.

    And Then What?  Even a modest, partial success with some of the elements of this project can provide the seeds for a variety of subsequent projects and activities; all of which can (I posit) build on a better-informed baseline of insight derived from the experiences to date of teaching and learning using these or similar innovation tactics here at ERAU.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Update content and teaching design, CISSP Official Training Course, to meet 2021 best security practices

    PI Michael Wills

    Research, curate, and redevelop all course materials to meet 2021 best cybersecurity practices and certification requirements for (ISC)2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional program

    Lead subject matter expert on this project, which fully rewrote all course materials (1100+ pgs, 1200+ slides and other materials) to bring (ISC)2's flagship certification program up to current (2021) exam certification needs, industry best practice, and current and evolving information security threat. Collaborated with five other subject matter experts, curating findings drawn from over 200 industry, government, and research sources. Redesigned content flow and structure to establish clarity and consistency in scaffolding, voice, presentation, and ease of use.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Research, Curate, Update content and teaching design, SSCP Official Training Course, to meet 2021 best security practices

    PI Michael Wills

    Research, curate, and redevelop all course materials to meet 2021 best cybersecurity practices and certification requirements for (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Professional program

    Subject matter expert on this project, which fully rewrote all course materials (900+ pgs and other materials) to bring (ISC)2's foundational information systems security certification program up to current (2021) exam certification needs, industry best practice, and current and evolving information security threat. Consulted with technical reviewer and other subject matter experts as I curated findings drawn from over 200 industry, government, and research sources. Redesigned content flow and structure to establish clarity and consistency in scaffolding, voice, presentation, and ease of use.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Usability of Urban Air Mobility: Quantitative and Qualitative Assessments of Usage in Emergency Situations

    PI Scott Winter

    CO-I Stephen Rice

    CO-I Sean Crouse

    ​The purpose of these studies is to determine the usability of urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles in the emergency response to natural disasters and the ideal locations for their take-off and landing sites to occur, consistent with the Center's Theme 2. UAM involves aerial vehicles, mostly operated autonomously, which can complete short flights around urban areas, although their applications are expanding to rural operations as well. While initially designed to support advanced transportation mobility, these vehicles could offer numerous advantages in the emergency response to natural disasters. Through a series of four studies with over 2,000 total participants, quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to identify UAM vehicles' usability in response to natural disasters. The studies will examine the types of natural disasters and types of missions where UAM could be considered usable, along with the creation of a valid scale to determine vertiport usability. Interviews will also be conducted to provide qualitative insights to complement the quantitative findings.

    ​In this proposed series of four studies, our overall purpose will be to determine the usability of urban air mobility in the emergency response to natural disasters. As the concepts of urban air mobility move closer to reality, these mostly autonomous aerial vehicles may provide valuable contributions to our response after natural disasters. However, little prior research has examined the types of natural disasters, types of missions, or locations where UAM could be deployed in the emergency response. The first objective of this research will be to assess the usability of UAM based on the type of natural disaster and type of mission. Following this, the research will develop a valid scale to measure possible locations where UAM operations could be conducted following a natural disaster, such as city parks, building rooftops, or existing helipads. The final objective of this study will be to gather qualitative data through interviews to complement the quantitative findings and offer more significant insights and explanations as to the usability of UAM in response to natural disasters.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Assessing If Motivation Impacts General Aviation Pilots’ Persistence in Varying Weather Conditions

    PI Sabrina Woods

    CO-I Scott Winter

    Continued flight under visual flight rules into instrument meteorological conditions is the predominant cause for fatal accidents by percentage, for general aviation aircraft operations. It is possible that a pilot’s motivation or reason for flying will override other safer, more logical courses of action when a hazard presents itself. The decision appears to stem from a willingness to persist in a course of action despite factors that indicate an alternate and safer course is warranted. This research addresses what is currently presumed about the decision to continue flying under visual flight rules into instrument conditions and marries those ideas with the extensive studies on how theoretically affects the decision-making process.



    The research used a quantitative factorial experimental design and explored what bearing, if any, does type of motivation, or meteorological condition, or the interaction of the two have on a pilot’s willingness to persist in visual flight rule into instrument meteorological conditions. The researcher applied fundamental motivation theory and aviation regulation in the development of scenarios that were used to assess a pilot’s willingness to persist in unsafe weather conditions, and to determine what role motivation and the weather conditions might have played in that decision. A 3x3 factorial design was followed, and the method of analysis was a two-way mixed analysis of variance.

    The independent variable meteorological condition indicated a significant effect on the dependent variable willingness to persist, and the independent variable motivation did not indicate a significant effect. The interaction between meteorological condition and motivation resulted in a significant effect on the dependent variable, particularly in the marginal weather condition, although with a low effect size. This result suggests that those who are motivated to fly for a specific reason or reasons might be more willing to persist over those who have no real reason to be flying. A recommendation for future research is that the experiment be replicated in a direct observation experimental design in either a full or partial motion simulator.

    Further defining how motivation and meteorological conditions influence aeronautical decision-making can change the way aviation safety advocates, academics, regulators, and industry approach the issue. The results of this research could help determine what part of aeronautical decision making is objective and what is more subject to a person’s base desires.

    Categories: Graduate

  • Distributed Detection and Control of Collective Behaviors in Multi-agent Systems

    PI Tianyu Yang

    Multi-agent systems can be defined as a group of dynamical systems, in which certain emergent behaviors are exhibited through the local interaction among group members that individually have the capability of self-operating. The key issues we study include the analysis of network controllability and the design of coordination control protocol in order to achieve autonomous and optimal tasking allocation. Also, the detection and resilient control of emergent behaviors in large scale multi-agent systems are of keen interest. 

    Our analysis is conducted through modeling, detection, learning, and estimation of agent interaction dynamics and interaction topologies, and the design of resilient cooperative control protocols. The projects have been funded by Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate (AFRL/RI) Machine Intelligence for Mission Focused Autonomy (MIMFA) program. The projects are in collaboration with researchers from Bradley University

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

201-210 of 245 results