Meredith Carroll, Ph.D.

Professor | College of Aeronautics Florida Tech

  • Melbourne FL

Dr. Carroll's research focuses on decision-making in complex systems, human-machine teaming, performance assessment and adaptive training.

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NASA Asks Researchers to Help Define Trustworthiness in Autonomous Systems

A Florida Tech-led group of researchers was selected to help NASA solve challenges in aviation through its prestigious University Leadership Initiative (ULI) program. Over the next three years, associate professor of computer science and software engineering Siddhartha Bhattacharyya and professor of aviation human factors Meredith Carroll will work to understand the vital role of trust in autonomy. Their project, “Trustworthy Resilient Autonomous Agents for Safe City Transportation in the Evolving New Decade” (TRANSCEND), aims to establish a common framework for engineers and human operators to determine the trustworthiness of machine-learning-enabled autonomous aviation safety systems. Autonomous systems are those that can perform independent tasks without requiring human control. The autonomy of these systems is expected to be enhanced with intelligence gained from machine learning. As a result, intelligence-based software is expected to be increasingly used in airplanes and drones. It may also be utilized in airports and to manage air traffic in the future. Learning-enabled autonomous technology can also act as contingency management when used in safety applications, proactively addressing potential disruptions and unexpected aviation events. TRANSCEND was one of three projects chosen for the latest ULI awards. The others hail from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach – researching continuously updating, self-diagnostic vehicle health management to enhance the safety and reliability of Advanced Air Mobility vehicles – and University of Colorado Boulder – investigating tools for understanding and leveraging the complex communications environment of collaborative, autonomous airspace systems. Florida Tech’s team includes nine faculty members from five universities: Penn State; North Carolina A&T State University; University of Florida; Stanford University; Santa Fe College. It also involves the companies Collins Aerospace in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and ResilienX of Syracuse, New York. Carroll and Bhattacharyya will also involve students throughout the project. Human operators are an essential component of aviation technology – they monitor independent software systems and associated data and intervene when those systems fail. They may include flight crew members, air traffic controllers, maintenance personnel or safety staff monitoring overall system safety. A challenge in implementing independent software is that engineers and operators have different interpretations of what makes a system “trustworthy,” Carroll and Bhattacharyya explained. Engineers who develop autonomous software measure trustworthiness by the system’s ability to perform as designed. Human operators, however, trust and rely on systems to perform as they expect – they want to feel comfortable relying on a system to make an aeronautical decision in flight, such as how to avoid a traffic conflict or a weather event. Sometimes, that reliance won’t align with design specifications. Equally important, operators also need to trust that the software will alert them when it needs a human to take over. This may happen if the algorithm driving the software encounters a scenario it wasn’t trained for. “We are looking at how we can integrate trust from different communities – from human factors, from formal methods, from autonomy, from AI…” Bhattacharyya said. “How do we convey assumptions for trust, from design time to operation, as the intelligent systems are being deployed, so that we can trust them and know when they’re going to fail, especially those that are learning-enabled, meaning they adapt based on machine learning algorithms?” With Bhattacharyya leading the engineering side and Carroll leading the human factors side, the research group will begin bridging the trust gap by integrating theories, principles, methods, measures, visualizations, explainability and practices from different domains – this will build the TRANSCEND framework. Then, they’ll test the framework using a diverse range of tools, flight simulators and intelligent decision-making to demonstrate trustworthiness in practice. This and other data will help them develop a safety case toolkit of guidelines for development processes, recommendations and suggested safety measures for engineers to reference when designing “trustworthy,” learning-enabled autonomous systems. Ultimately, Bhattacharyya and Carroll hope their toolkit will lay the groundwork for a future learning-enabled autonomous systems certification process. “The goal is to combine all our research capabilities and pull together a unified story that outputs unified products to the industry,” Carroll said. “We want products for the industry to utilize when implementing learning-enabled autonomy for more effective safety management systems.” The researchers also plan to use this toolkit to teach future engineers about the nuances of trust in the products they develop. Once developed, they will hold outreach events, such as lectures and camps, for STEM-minded students in the community. If you're interested in connecting with Meredith Carroll or Siddhartha Bhattacharyya simply click on the expert's profile or contact  Adam Lowenstein, Director of Media Communications at Florida Institute of Technology at adam@fit.edu to arrange an interview today.

Meredith Carroll, Ph.D.

Areas of Expertise

Training Fidelity Analysis
Adaptive Training
Individual Differences
Urban Air Mobility (UAM)
Cybersecurity
Learner Engagement
Decision Making
Stress and Resilience
Human Machine Teaming
Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)
Cognitive and Affective State
Behavioral and Physiological Assessment
Return on Training Investment

About

Dr. Meredith Carroll is a professor of aviation human factors and director of the Advancing Technology-interaction and Learning in Aviation Systems (ATLAS) Lab at Florida Tech's College of Aeronautics. She has nearly 20 years of experience studying human/team performance and training in complex systems.

Her research focuses on decision-making in complex systems, cognition and learning, human-machine teaming, performance assessment and adaptive training. She has been funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Army Research Laboratory to study different facets of these areas.

Dr. Carroll also worked at the Kennedy Space Center conducting user-centered design of International Space Station payloads, processing facilities and ground support equipment.

She teaches a range of human factors courses aimed at giving students practical, hands-on experience in applying theories of cognition and learning to optimize performance in a range of situations from aviation to defense.

Some of Dr. Carroll's projects include research currently funded by AFOSR to study trust in heterogeneous, multi-level human-agent teams, including interventions to ensure proper calibration of human trust in agents/autonomous systems and strategies to repair trust after a trust violation. She is also currently funded by ONR to examine instructional strategies to engage and educate under represented minorities (women and minorities) in the field of cybersecurity, including development of a pilot training program for local high schools. Dr. Carroll is also conducting research in the field of Urban/AdvancedAir Mobility (U/AAM), examining human factors considerations for pilot operations of emerging vehicle and operational concepts. She was also recently funded by the FAA to study pilot decision making on the flight deck, including how to effectively integrate information from multiple sources and support pilots in making effective decisions when faced with information with varying levels of integrity, reliability and security.

Media Assets

Media Appearances

Air Taxis? Vertiports? New Course at Florida Tech Explores Urban Air Mobility

Florida Tech News  online

2021-06-29

Students will work in multidisciplinary teams that include industry stakeholders and hear from guest speakers from organizations including Uber Elevate (which was acquired by Joby Aviation last year) and the FAA. It will be facilitated by Meredith Carroll, professor in aviation human factors at Florida Tech’s College of Aeronautics, along with industry professional Chris Fernando and others.

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$600,000 FAA Grant Awarded to Florida Tech to Investigate How Pilots Make Decisions

Space Coast Daily News  online

2017-09-06

Meredith Carroll, associate professor of Aviation Human Factors, received a $600,000 FAA grant subcontracted through Enroute Computer Solutions to study how pilots respond when faced with discrepant data in the cockpit.

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‘Looks like we lost the other one’

Corporate Jet Investor  print

2021-05-01

Meredith Carroll, associate professor of Aviation Human Factors at (Florida Tech), said some airlines are beginning to consider how they can prepare their pilots to deal with stress more effectively. Carroll has constructed research with the US military on stress training techniques. In one example, service members were asked to perform difficult mental calculations or to make a high-stakes presentation immediately before their simulator session to provide an opportunity to perform under stress.

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Education

University of Central Florida

Ph.D.

Applied Experimental/Human Factors Psychology

2010

Florida Institute of Technology

M.S.

Aviation Science

2003

University of Virginia

B.S.

Aerospace Engineering

2001

Social

Selected Articles

An adaptive learning model for predicting and analyzing student performance on flight training tasks

Proceedings Volume 12122, Signal Processing, Sensor/Information Fusion, and Target Recognition XXXI

2022

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Teammates Instead of Tools: The Impacts of Level of Autonomy on Mission Performance and Human–Agent Teaming Dynamics in Multi-Agent Distributed Teams

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

2022

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User Experience, Knowledge, Perceptions, and Behaviors Associated with Internet of Things (IoT) Device Information Privacy

International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

2022

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Affiliations

  • Florida Tech Research Council : Chair
  • Florida Tech Women's Council : Professional Development Subcomittee Co-Chair
  • Florida Tech University Teaching Track Promotion Board : Member
  • College of Aeronautics Graduate Program Committee : Member
  • College of Aeronautics Doctoral Comprehensive Examination Committee : Member
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Event Appearances

Training Approaches to Promote Resilient Performance in Pilots

Global ATS-V