Dr. Frank Ritter, associate professor of information sciences and technology, is the co-author of “Automated GOMS-to-ACT-R Model Translation,” which has taken Best Applied Paper honors for the upcoming Sixth International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM).
The paper, written with Dr. Robert St. Amant, associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, is scheduled to be formally presented at the conference in Pittsburgh on July 31. It will be published in the conference proceedings.
Amant and Ritter have developed G2A, which produces ACT-R models (computer simulations of human behavior) from GOMS models, a lower-level, easier to use modeling description. In doing so, the collaborators have developed a way to take a commonly used HCI tool that is easy to use but less powerful, and created a programming language from it that generates more accurate models that can do tasks on their own.
G2A could be used to create better computer game models or, more importantly, to understand how psychology theories of human-computer interaction are related and how to translate between them.
To learn more, please see the paper in full at http://acs.ist.psu.edu/papers/stamantR04.pdf.
