Abstract:
Baboons do not have language, not much by way of material culture and they do not deliberately collaborate; yet they establish complex social networks and negotiate in politically sophisticated ways (think coalitions, hostage taking and long term alliances). Building on models of social complexity in primates (Hinde, 1987) and distributed cognition in humans (Hutchins, 1995) I used social interaction data on wild baboons to develop state-space and time series descriptions of complex dynamics. This helped reconfigure approaches to the analysis of behavior in order to address socio-cognitive questions. As it turns out, this approach was easily extended ‘back' to human behavior in complex socio-technical systems. I will show how it worked with studying lane-changing behavior in human drivers in Nissan’s ‘magic bumper’ project circa 2002-2005, and how I continue to study human meaning making in HumanDrive, a UK consortium effort that is trying to understand human drivers' adaptation to ‘roadside furniture’ in order to build an effective autonomous controller. As time permits I’ll share related aspects from a project on kid-friendly robots (RUBI) in early childhood education.
Bio:
Trained in behavioral ecology and cognitive science, Forster is currently a research specialist in the Contextual Robotics Institute and affiliated faculty in the Design Lab at UC San Diego. Having studied social complexity and distributed cognition in wild baboons, Forster then extended her professional engagements in the contexts of automotive design, architecture education, and art-science collaborations. Returning to UCSD and completing her PhD in cognitive science in 2012, Forster is typically embedded within engineering / computation / design-centered research efforts that also tracks behavior in complex socio-technical systems. From kid-friendly robots (RUBI) to automated pain detection in humans and other mammals (horses, dogs, monkeys, rats) Forster supports the development of interdisciplinary research networks (today’s ‘convergence science’) and continues to forge creative connections with art and design in both academia and industry.