Alonso Vera, Ph.D.

Research Engineer -- NASA
Group Lead

Academic Background

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University, 1990-1993
Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, Cornell University, 1991
B.S., McGill University, 1985

Research Background

Alonso Vera has been doing research on basic and applied human-computer interaction problems since 1990. He worked with Bonnie John and Allen Newell on the first effort to represent GOMS models in Soar (John & Vera, 1992; John, Vera, & Newell, 1993; John, Vera, & Newell, 1994). Alonso also worked with Richard Lewis to develop and empirically validate the predictions of Soar models using a novel learning approach (Vera, Lewis, & Lerch, 1993; Vera & Lewis, 1996). He developed GOMS models of ship-based radar operators using GLEAN (Rosenblatt & Vera, 1995; Vera & Rosenblatt, 1995; Vera, 1999). These models, along with those developed with Bonnie John earlier, were among the first successful attempts to model highly interactive computer-based tasks using GOMS (in contrast to the more typical user-driven that had been modeled to date). While at Carnegie Mellon University, Alonso also worked with Herb Simon on a series of theoretical papers on cognition and situated activity.

For the past three years, Alonso has been working on the implementation and extension of the CPM-GOMS method (Vera, Remington, Matessa, John, & Freed, under review; Matessa, Vera, John, Remington, and Freed, 2002; John, Vera, Matessa, Freed, and Remington, 2002). This work has continued with Andrew Howes (Cardiff, Richard Lewis (U Michigan) and Mike McCurdy toward the development of the a theory of behavior composition implemented in a tool called CORE (Constraint-based Optimal Reasoning Engine). This work also involves the development of usable tools to support human performance modeling with Irene Tollinger, Mike McCurdy, Andrew Howes, and Rick Lewis. This tool is called X-PRT (Expert-Performance Research Toolkit).

Recent Papers

Tollinger, I., Lewis, R.L., McCurdy, M., Tollinger, P., Vera, A.H., Howes, A., Pelton, L. (2005). Supporting efficient development of cognitive models at multiple skill levels: exploring recent advances in constraint-based modeling. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 411-420.

Vera, A., John, B., Remington, R., Matessa, M., & Freed, M. (2005) Automating Human-Performance Modeling at the Millisecond Level. Human-Computer Interaction.

Tollinger, I., McCurdy, M., Vera, A.H., Tollinger, P. (2004). Collaborative knowledge management supporting mars mission scientists. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 29-38.

Vera, A.H., Howes, A., McCurdy, M., Lewis, R.L., (2004) A constraint satisfaction approach to predicting skilled interactive cognition. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, 121-128.