Talks by Kyle Arch and Wenchao Jiang

Kyle Arch and Wenchao Jiang, both of the MRL, will give short talks on their PhDs to the research group.

Kyle Arch

Kyle Arch is a third year PhD student from the Horizon CDT. His PhD surrounds teamwork in online games. In common usage, the word “team” is used to describe gamers who play together in online games. However, Human Factors, Business, and Psychology have established a wealth of research into what is required for groups of people to exhibit teamwork. Whether the term “team” is relevant to the collaborations that exists between strangers  in online games, it is interesting to examine the way in which these collaborations in a novel area function, especially without any supporting structures that would manifest between players that know each other through guilds or offline friendships, for example. This presentation is an update on the activities that took place in the first full year of research, and the possible future directions of the work.

Wenchao Jiang

Wenchao Jiang is a PhD student from MRL, who just submitted his PhD thesis at the time of this writing. His Thesis title is “Investigating Interactional issues of automated planning support for disaster response”. In the research community of Multi-Agent Systems(MAS), a number of agent coordination algorithms has been devised to guide robotic teams ( e.g. a swarm of drones ) to conduct disaster response(DR) operations (e.g. search and rescue). However, it has been realised that the DR operations may still be conducted by human responders (e.g. firefighters and medics) in the near future. Therefore, this PhD work is interested in applying existing MAS algorithms to build automated planning support systems for human DR teams. Primary focus of this PhD is to explore potential interaction design issues of such systems. This presentation is a summary of the PhD work and an update of the Wenchao’s future career plan in general.