Multitasking, interruptions, and the inevitable problems that follow

Speaker
Duncan Brumby
Senior Lecturer & Associate Professor, UCL Interaction Centre, University College of London

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Computing devices are increasingly used to support many of our daily activities. However, these devices are often used in mobile and demanding multitask settings. In this talk, I shall describe our work that has investigated how people allocate their attention to a secondary device while driving. I shall also talk about recent work that has investigated how people recover from interruptions. I shall report data from controlled lab studies and insights gained from the development of computational cognitive models of human performance. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of how people multitask and manage interruptions while interacting with computers.

Speaker's Bio

Duncan Brumby is a senior lecturer (associate professor) at University College London in the UCL Interaction Centre, and is currently on sabbatical at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UCL in 2007, he was an associate research scientist at Drexel University in the Department of Computer Science, and he received his PhD in experimental psychology from Cardiff University in 2005. Dr. Brumby’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and cognitive science. He has investigated problems associated with in-car multitasking, how people manage and recover from interruptions, and how people search for information on the web. This work has been published in leading journals and conference proceedings, including Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Human Factors, and the ACM SIGCHI conference. His work on multitasking has received best paper awards at the ACM SIGCHI conference (2007, 2012), and his work on interactive search is one of the most-cited articles from the Human-Computer Interaction journal 2008–2010.

Speaker's Website
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/uclic/people/d-brumby

Host
Laura Dabbish