Multiscale Quantitative Analytics of Human Visual Searching Tasks

Benefit from the recent advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, industrial automation has replaced human labors in many tasks. However, humans are still placed in the central role when visual searching tasks are highly involved for manufacturing decision-making. For example, highly customized products fabricated by additive manufacturing processes have posed significant challenges to AI methods in terms of their performance and generalizability. As a result, in practice, human visual searching tasks are still widely involved in manufacturing contexts (e.g., human resource management, quality inspection, etc.) based on various visualization techniques. Quantitatively modeling the visual searching behaviors and performance will not only contribute to the understanding of decision-making process in a visualization system, but also advance AI methods by incubating them with human expertise. In general, visual searching can be quantitatively understood from multiple scales, namely, 1) the population scale to treat individuals equally and model the general relationship between individual's physiological signals with visual searching decisions; 2) the individual scale to model the relationship between individual differences and visual searching decisions; and 3) the attention scale to model the relationship between individuals' attention in visual searching and visual searching decisions. The advancements of wearable sensing techniques enable such multiscale quantitative analytics of human visual searching performance. For example, by equipping human users with electroencephalogram (EEG) device, eye tracker, and logging system, the multiscale quantitative relationships among human physiological signals, behaviors and performance can be readily established. This dissertation attempts to quantify visual searching process from multiple scales by proposing (1) a data-fusion method to model the quantitative relationship between physiological signals and human's perceived task complexities (population scale, Chapter 2); (2) a recommender system to quantify and decompose the individual differences into explicit and implicit differences via personalized recommender system-based sensor analytics (individual scale, Chapter 3); and (3) a visual language processing modeling framework to identify and correlate visual cues (i.e., identified from fixations) with humans' quality inspection decisions in human visual searching tasks (attention scale, Chapter 4). Finally, Chapter 5 summarizes the contributions and proposes future research directions. The proposed methodologies can be readily extended to other applications and research studies to support multi-scale quantitative analytics. Besides, the quantitative understanding of human visual searching behaviors performance can also generate insights to further incubate AI methods with human expertise. Merits of the proposed methodologies are demonstrated in a visualization evaluation user study, and a cognitive hacking user study. Detailed notes to guide the implementation and deployment are provided for practitioners and researchers in each chapter.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Chen, Xiaoyu

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Jin, Ran

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Bowman, Douglas A.
• Gabbard, Joseph L.
• Lau, Nathan

• Computational attention
• Machine learning
• recommender system
• visual attention
• wearable sensing

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:31941

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104200