Presentation
2008: Post-doc at the ASC Lab / CIST / PSU.
2005-2008: PhD student at the LESCOT / INRETS in partnership with the LIRIS and the LEACM.
Before 2004: I was a software engineer and project manager in the field of automatization of factories.
Interests
My general interest is about "Learning from activity". It may concern both how an analyst can learn about a Subject performing an activity, or how an automatic agent can learn from his own activity. I think these issues are interesting, first because they address the question of symbol grounding, second because they reduce the amount of knowledge modelers have to manually encode in artificial agents. I have an example ongoing project of "Modeling Buttom-up learning in Soar" in this blog.
PhD Research
Analyzing traces of activity for cognitive modeling: Application to the car driver
How can we describe the mental processes and states carried out by a human when he or she performs an activity? What are the mental processes or state? How can we infer them from the behavior and statements? How to describe them? Our goal is to provide answers to these questions, in the context of car driving.
To this end, we have collected "traces of activity" during an experiment made with an instrumented vehicle. They are sequences of events that describe the interaction of the driver with his environment. They contain data from sensors or from assessments made by the ergonomist or by the driver. We have developed a progressive process for modeling these traces. It is based on a knowledge engineering tool (named ABSTRACT), which we have specifically designed and implemented. This process allows us to produce models of the activity at different levels of abstraction. From these models, we show how an ergonomist can explain the activity, in reference to their own theoretical explicative framework.
The framework that we have chosen comes from cognitive psychology. It proposes to describe the mental processes and states of the subject as "cognitive schemas" carried out at different "levels of control". Our approach allows us to search and find the implementation of cognitive schemas in the activity and to propose models of these schemas.
From an epistemological viewpoint, this approach is based on a "constructivist" positioning, i.e. evolutionist, pragmatic and driven by the ergonomist. Our results consist of the methodology that we have developed, the software tool that we have built, the models of the activity that we have produced, and the cognitive schemas that we have modeled.
Alain Mille (Liris)
Robert Martin (Leacm)
Thierry Bellet (Inrets)
Repports and publications
2008: Analyzing traces of activity for modeling cognitive schemes of operators. To appear in AISB Quarterly (in press).
2008: Analyse de traces d'activité pour la modélisation cognitive : Application à la conduite automobile. PhD Thesis (in French).
Presentations
May 5 2008: Can Activity Trace Database Become Cognitive Models?. 28th Soar Workshop, Ann Arbor.
March 31 2008: Analyzing traces of activity for cognitive modeling: Application to the car driver.
Psych brown bag meeting, psu. A translation, a little bit shortened of my PhD defending.
February 19 2008: Analyse de traces d'activité pour la modélisation cognitive : Application à la conduite automobile. PhD defending (In French). Listen the audio version (In French, 33Mo).
July 27 2007: Creating Cognitive Models from Activity Analysis: A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Car Driver Modeling. International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM2007).
December 12 2006: ABSTRACT: Analysis of Behavior and Situation for menTal Representation Assessment and Cognitive acTivity modelling
October 11 2005: Tracing driving activity for cognitive modeling and Slides of demonstration of the software. Presented at Technical University of Chemnitz.
June 13 2005: Tracing Driving Activity for Assessing Driver Situation Awareness. Presentation to the Humanist/TF1 meeting in Santorini.
March 16 2005: Assessing driver situation awareness from their behaviour. Presented in the Humainst meeting of Bron, France.
