Thursday, January 22, 2015

FWS Research Assistant Highlights: Roohussaba Khairullah

My name is
Roohussaba Khairullah and I am a research assistant in The TRUstworthy and Mindful AutomatioN (TRUMAN) Lab. The primary goals of this lab is to understand how different automated agents interact with humans and the ways in which these agents may affect performance, trust, reliance, and compliance during a task. This lab is led by Dr. Ewart De Visser who has a Ph.D. in Human Factors and Applied Cognition.

I am currently working under Kaitlyn Marinaccio, the lead researcher, on the DICON experiment in which we are assessing the performance and trust levels of operators interacting with automated systems and while using adaptive trust cues to calibrate trust, enhance the operator’s decision making. As part of the OSCAR work study program, I am involved in research on human trust in varying levels of automation. I have always been interested in learning more about Psychology and I enjoy studying topics such as trust and perception. As a research assistant, I have many responsibilities such as collecting and analyzing data, searching for articles to summarize and present to the lab, and assisting in running experiments. Basically, I help the researchers in any way I can and follow the directions provided by them. Recently, I have learned how to run experiments in real life. Although as a Biology major, I have run multiple experiments on flies, arthropods and other animals, this was the first time when I was dealing with human beings and it was quite fun. In a long-term, this experiment is providing me with the experience of dealing with actual human being. Since as a pre-medical student, I have read about the systems of human beings at a cellular and organ level in books, but this experiment allows me to see them as a whole and allow me to see that human beings have feelings, emotions and their own thinking and also how their performance, trust, reliance, and compliance are affected during a task in real life.