Name: Matthew Scalia 

Master’s Thesis Proposal Meeting
Date: Tuesday, November 30th, 2021
Time: 10:30 AM
Location: https://bluejeans.com/933863484/0858
 
Advisor:
Jamie Gorman, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
 
Thesis Committee Members: 

Jamie Gorman, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Bruce Walker, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech) 

Christopher Wiese, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech) 

Title: Developing Objective Communication-based Measures of Trust for Human-Autonomy Teams 

Abstract:  As artificial intelligence capabilities have improved, humans have begun teaming with autonomous agents that have the capability to communicate and make intelligent decisions that are adaptable to task situations. Trust is a core component of human-human and human-autonomy team (HAT) interaction. As with all-human teams, the amount of trust held within a HAT will impact the team’s ability to perform effectively and achieve its goals. A recent theoretical framework, distributed dynamic team trust (D2T2; Huang et al., 2021), relates trust, team interaction measures, and team performance in HATs and has called for interaction-based measures of trust that go beyond traditional questionnaire-based approaches to measure the dynamics of trust in real time. In this research, I will examine these relationships by investigating HAT communication measures (amount, frequency, affect, and “pushing” vs. “pulling” of information between team members) as a mechanism for D2T2 and will attempt to validate these measures against questionnaire-based trust measures as well as team performance in a three-team member remotely-piloted aerial system (RPAS) HAT synthetic task. I predict that the questionnaire-based trust scores will be related to team performance, but the communication-based D2T2 measures will account for that relationship. The implications of this research would be that objective interaction-based communication measures could be practically applied to measure trust and predict performance in real-time, which is not possible using traditional questionnaire measures of trust. If the D2T2 framework can be validated, then we could gain insight into the dynamic nature of trust and how it relates to team performance.