Speaker: Dr B.L. William Wong

Abstract: What do emergency medical dispatchers do and why do they
do what they do? Understanding this gives us insights into how we
design the interaction and the representations (information) needed
to support operators in particularly dynamic and complex processes
such as emergency ambulance command and control. In this talk Dr
Wong will briefly describe some of the findings from recent research
into the command and control of emergency ambulances at the London
Ambulance Service. This study was conducted with colleagues at
Middlesex University while on sabbatical leave in London. Using the
Critical Decision Method approach to cogntive task analysis,
situation awareness was observed to play a significant role in
operational decision making of emergency medical dispatchers (EMD).
The talk will briefly describe how they maintain situation awareness
of developments around them and how this awareness affects their
decision making, and the demands that this places on their
interaction with the systems and the processes that they control.
The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the implications
this has for the design of command and control systems.

About the speaker: Dr William Wong is Senior Lecturer and directs
the Multimedia Systems Research Laboratory at the Department of
Information Science. Recently returned from sabbatical, he spent the
first half of his sabbatical at the Interaction Design Centre,
Middlesex University, London, and the later half at the Swinburne
Computer-Human Interaction Laboratory, Swinburne University of
Technology, Melbourne. Dr Wong has researched human-systems
interaction and information portrayal issues in the command and
control of emergency ambulances in New Zealand, Australia, and in the
UK.