| Special Seminar Talks

Name of the Speaker: Dr Kesav Kaza
Venue: ESB-234 (Malaviya Hall)
Date/Time: 4th April 2025 (Friday), 3:00 PM
Title: Decision Referrals in Human-Automation Teams: Impact of task load on team performance

Abstract :

Rapid advancements in AI systems have led to an increased interest in joint decision making using human-AI teams. Unlike AI, the performance of the human is dependent on factors such as cognitive workload, fatigue, trust in the automation, etc. I will first present a general introduction to the impact of human-factors on the performance of systems with humans in the loop. Then, the problem of decision referrals in human automation teams will be introduced. Here, we consider the problem of optimal decision referrals in human-automation teams performing binary classification tasks. The automation, which includes a pre-trained classifier, observes data for a batch of independent tasks, analyzes them, and may refer a subset of tasks to a human operator for fresh and final analysis. Our key modeling assumption is that human performance degrades with task load. We model the problem of choosing which tasks to refer, as a stochastic optimization problem and show that, for a given task load, it is optimal to myopically refer to tasks that yield the largest reduction in the expected cost, conditional on the observed data. This result provides a ranking scheme and an algorithm to determine the optimal set of tasks for referral. We evaluate the proposed referral policy against a baseline through an experimental study with human participants. Then, an application of this framework to counter drone surveillance will be presented and some results from field experiments will be briefly discussed. Finally, some open problems in the domain will be discussed.

Speaker Bio:

Kesav Kaza is currently a research fellow at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where he works on automated decision making applications in aerial robotics including UAV and counter-UAV systems. Earlier he was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Montreal from 2021 to 2023 where he worked on human-automation teams for decision making. Kesav Kaza received a Phd in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2020. He received his Btech and M.S. by research degrees from IIIT Hyderabad. His research interests include decision making under uncertainty, human-automation teaming, reinforcement learning, stochastic control, and domain adaptation.