Irene Tollinger

Research Scientist -- NASA

Academic Background

Master OF Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002
B.A. in Anthropology, Vassar College, 1999

Research and Applied Work

After completing a B.A. in Anthropology at Vassar College, Irene joined Envirosell, a market research consultancy specializing in ethnographic in-store research. Besides conducting meta-analyses of individual retailer studies, she worked on the usability of retail web sites. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute, Irene worked to improve human performance modeling methods with Ames researcher Alonso Vera. Since starting at Ames in 2002, she has continued the modeling work and taken on additional research and applied projects.

On the applied side, Irene contributed to the design of applications to support science and engineering operations on the Mars Exploration Rover ’03 missions. She worked on the Constraint Editor, a system for specifying and visualizing hundreds of changing science constraints (e.g. take these images 45 minutes apart) as well as MERBoard, (scientific collaboration), VIZ (3D visualization), and CIP (data navigation and scheduling). She has contributed to a number of other projects such as Investigation Organizer, a tool used to organize data during the Columbia Investigation. On the research side, in addition to human performance modeling, Irene has worked to understand the factors that affect group performance in the context of mission operations with University of Pittsburgh researcher Chris Schunn.

Over the last two years, Irene has focused on understanding user needs and developing systems to support anomaly resolution and problem reporting. She is currently working on requirements for the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system that will support the Constellation Program, NASA’s next generation manned vehicle.

Recent Papers

Tollinger, I., Schunn, C., Vera, A. (2006). What Changes When a Large Team Becomes More Expert? Analyses of Speedup in the Mars Exploration Rovers Science Planning Process. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference, Vancouver, Canada.

Eng, K., Lewis, R., Tollinger, I., Chu, A., Howes, A., Vera, A. (2006). Generating Automated Predictions of Behavior Strategically Adapted to Specific Performance Objectives. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 261-630.

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., Tollinger, I., Eng, K., Lewis, R., Howes, A., (2005). Architectural Building Blocks as the Locus of Adaptive Behavior Selection. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference. Stresa, Italy.

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.