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METRICS:
NASA is fundamentally team-oriented. Today's operations in mission control, payload integration, and vehicle processing are conducted by large teams of highly experienced experts. Gathering such experts for extended mission operations is increasingly problematic. Complex missions will require even larger teams in smaller clusters, collaborating over communications networks. HCC research is developing the technology base to understand and design for the requirements of these teams, and to capture and pass along (or automate) knowledge that might be lost between missions.
The Human-Centered Computing subproject aims to enhance individual and team productivity. The challenges have to do, in part, with inclusion of computer-based agents as team members. Efficient interaction among team members is a primary determinant of team productivity, whether it is through a display screen or over a voice loop. With respect to human-centered computing, mission effectiveness depends upon increasing the degree of task concurrency. Optimal concurrency of a task-set is limited only by logical dependencies among tasks. To the extent that ground-based or other human-based decision making requires postponement or serialization of tasks, fewer tasks can be performed and the effective team size is decreased.
One possible metric for degree of concurrency is team productivity, defined as the effective team size (or the number of human specialists required for equivalent performance using traditional NASA methods) for a representative set of mission tasks. Team productivity for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO; 1998) was about 10. Space Station operations (2005) will require a team productivity of 1,000. A long-term objective for Mars exploration (2013) is 10,000.
FUNDED TASKS:
For a chart of currently funded HCC tasks, see the HCC Tasks page. This includes both mission-directed and competitively awarded research. Task lists for each of the technical areas individually can be reached from the full HCC Tasks list or from the technical area pages. (Research tasks often embody multiple representations and approaches, and may relate to more than one of these technical areas.)
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