Adaptive Assistance for Crisis Response

Computer systems are becoming extremely powerful as well as more pervasive. In order to maximize their benefits, we want to provide adaptive interface layers between these systems and their users. Specifically, we expect the interface layer to adapt to unique characteristics of a particular user. Ultimately, we hope to uncover general principles of adaptive user interface design, which include techniques for modeling user habits, gathering information and feedback to drive those models, and a methodology for quantifying the value embodied in a particular adaptive user interface. Toward these ends, we have explored several problem domains and several modeling techniques. We have tested some of the combinations on users and are in the process of designing methods to test the others. Our strategy has been to first focus on the hardest problems with the assumption that we could learn the most from these. Thus, we have focused primarily on the crisis response domain, a domain where the user (responder) must cope with threat, uncertainty, and urgency. In this short abstract, we sketch our research with respect to crisis response, and then close with a summary of our efforts to generalize our methods and results.