Colloquium Talk Series: Dr. Heather Lum

Details

Bio: Dr. Heather C. Lum (she/her) is an assistant professor and director of the Virtual Environments & Cognitive Training Research (VECToR) laboratory at Arizona State University. She earned her Ph.D. in applied experimental and human factors psychology from the University of Central Florida in 2011. Her primary research interests focus on perceptions of technology, specifically the ways in which technology is impacting the way we interact with each other as humans. Other areas of interest include the use of psychophysiological measures such as eye tracking and vocal analyses to better determine and study the critical applied cognitive and experimental topics of interest such as spatial cognition, human-human and human-robot team interactions. Dr. Lum conducted research on human-non-human teaming in the summer of 2023 as part of the U.S. Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. She is also currently a Fulbright Specialist. In addition to her research pursuits, Dr. Lum is the current president of HF/E Women’s Organization for Mentoring and Networking (HFE WOMAN) and former events chair. She is also the former chair for the Cognitive Engineering & Decision-Making Technical Group and the Education Technical Group. She is also a K9 handler and training coordinator for the Yavapai County Search and Rescue Team-Search Dog Unit and a trainer/evaluator for the National Association for Search and Rescue.

Title: What being a search and rescue K9 handler has taught me: Key takeaways in the pursuit of more effective human-AI robot teams

Abstract: During her talk, Dr. Lum will discuss her time as a K9
handler and training coordinator for a wilderness search
and rescue team and how those lessons have helped
inform her research on human-AI teaming. In particular,
Dr. Lum will discuss the similarities between animal and
robot teammates and the unique teamwork
characteristics that arise when working with a
nonhuman entity. She will also discuss how this has
helped guide her work on creating different team
modeling than traditional human-human teams has
produced.