The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the iSchool at The University of British Columbia, is pleased to announce Dr. William Wong, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Head, Interaction Design Centre, at Middlesex University’s School of Science and Technology in London, UK, is the next speaker in our continuing series of lunchtime colloquia.He is presenting “Make It Visible: Applying Cognitive Systems Engineering to Intelligence Analysis” on Friday, March 1st, from 12 noon to 1 pm, in Room 301 at Hugh Dempster Pavilion.

In this talk, he will discuss how principles from Cognitive Systems Engineering, CSE, might be used to design Visual Analytics systems to support intelligence analysts. In designing systems to control processes such as nuclear power generation, CSE has been used to determine and model a priori the functional relationships that relate the performance of the processes with system outcomes. Visual forms are then created to represent these invariant relationships in ecological interface designs. Can cognitive systems engineering be applied to the domain of intelligence analysis? And if yes, how might this be? And how should CSE principles be applied to the design of visual representations in intelligence analysis to take advantage of the benefits we have seen when CSE is applied to causal systems?

Dr. William Wong’s research interest is in the representation design of information to support decision making in naturalistic environments. Recipient of over US$7.1 million in grants, and project coordinator for several projects, he is currently investigating the problems of visual analytics in sense-making domains with high information density and variability, in contexts such as intelligence analysis, financial systemic risk analysis, and low literacy users.