Cognitive Systems Engineering

Michael McNeese is a Professor and Director of the MINDS Group at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Dr. McNeese is also a Professor of Psychology (affiliated) in the Department of Psychology, and a Professor of Education (affiliated) in the Department of Learning Systems and Performance, at Penn State. Recently he stepped down as the Senior Associate Dean for Research, Graduate Studies, and Academic Affairs at the College of IST. He has worked on multiple research projects involving team cognition, human factors, crisis management and response, situation awareness, and interactive simulations over the last 30 years. His research has been funded by diverse sources (NSF, ONR, ARL, ARO, AFRL, MURI, NGIA, Lockheed Martin). He was a Senior Scientist and Director of Collaborative Design Technology at the USAF Research Laboratory prior to moving to Penn State in 2000. He was one of the principal scientists in the USAF responsible for team cognition as related to command and control and emergency operations. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Vanderbilt University and an M.A. in Experimental-Cognitive Psychology from the University of Dayton, and was a visiting professor at The Ohio State University, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering focusing on Cognitive Systems Engineering. Dr. McNeese is one of the original ten faculty members of the College of IST, and is the Director of the MINDS Group which focuses on: a) collaborative systems that bring together the confluences of cognition, collaboration, and computation and b) intelligent tools through innovations of affective computing, artificial intelligence, and computer-supported cooperative work perspectives. He has over 250 publications in diverse application domains including human factors, emergency crisis management; fighter pilot performance; human-computer interaction, trust and automation, command and control operations; cyber-security; intelligence and image analyst work; information fusion, emergency medicine; and aviation. His most recent work has focused on the cognitive science perspectives within cyber-security utilizing an interdisciplinary Living Laboratory Framework.

Dr. David Hall is a Professor of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University and founding Director of the Center for Network Centric Cognition and Information Fusion. He has over 30 years of experience in multi-source information fusion, software system development, and research and development. He served as the Associate Director and Senior Scientist for the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory, Director of IR&D at HRB Systems, and Research Manager at the Computer Sciences Corporation. He has consulted for the USAF TENCAP Program, the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), the National Security Agency, NASA, and acted as a Technical Advisory to the Defense Department's Joint Directors of Laboratories Data Fusion Group. He honors include award of the DoD Joe Mignona National Data Fusion for his lifetime contributions to data fusion and he was named as an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to data fusion. He is author of several texts including: Human-Centric Information Fusion (co-authored with J. Jordan) (Artech House, 2010), Mathematical Techniques in Multisensor Data Fusion (Artech House, 2004), and co-editor of the book, Distributed Data Fusion for Network Centric Operations, CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2013).