Mike McCurdy

Research Scientist -- NASA

Academic Background

Master of Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002
B.H.A. in Interaction Design, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001

Research and Applied Work

Mike is a researche and designer in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Ames. He has a masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon ('02). As part of his coursework in that program he spent nine months working on applied cognitive modeling tools with Alonso Vera, Roger Remington, and Mike Matessa in the spring and summer of 2002. During that time he was also an active contributor to the MERBoard project which has been deployed at JPL for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Since coming to Ames in early 2003, he has expanded his role in several applied projects for the '03 MER mission and other domains, including the design of the Constraint Editor and the infusion of the MAPGEN/Planner tools, providing design input to the Investigation Organizer team for use by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, input to the Collaborative Information Portal team, and input to the VIZ 3D Visualization tool team.

He has also worked with Alonso Vera, Andrew Howes, and Rick Lewis on the development of a theory of behavior composition implemented in a tool called CORE, and has begun work on a set of usable tools for interacting with CORE called X-PRT.

Recent Papers

McCurdy, M., Connors, C., Pyrzak, G., Kanefsky, B., & Vera, A. (2006). Breaking the fidelity barrier: An examination of current prototypes and an example of a mixed-fidelity success. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

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 the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 411-420.

Vera, A.H., Howes, A., McCurdy, M., Lewis, R.L., (2004) A constraint satisfaction approach to predicting skilled interactive cognition.Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 121-128.

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.