Fighter pilot turned scientist Missy Cummings

She was an ace fighter pilot in the US Navy, and now she’s a top scientist – this is a Big Ask you’re definitely going to want to read…

Missy Cummings was one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy and got to fly F/A-18s for a living. Now, she’s a scientist, using her first hand experience of difficulties in automation in her own laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory News spoke to Missy to find out a bit more about her amazing experiences.

You used to be a fighter pilot in the navy – what made you want to do this?

I have always liked to go fast and do exciting things. In my freshman year at the US Naval Academy when I found out women could become jet pilots, I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to do. And then the next year Top Gun came out, which of course only sealed the deal!

And now you’re director of a scientific laboratory – pretty amazing stuff! What prompted the change?

As one of the US Navy’s first female fighter pilots, the road was expectedly rough. While I loved the flying (especially the dogfighting), the social issues were very difficult. My male peers did not want me there; they were not welcoming of women, and made life very difficult. After flying F/A-18s for three years, I decided that I needed to move on. The Navy then required me to teach Navy ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) for  a year and a half at Penn State where I found out how much I loved teaching and research. So after I left the Navy, I went back to school to get my PhD.

Tell us about the Humans and Automation Lab and your work at MIT:

I created my lab, the Humans and Automation Lab (HAL, and yes, the joke was intentional) because I realised (due to my flying experience and research background) that technology was quickly outpacing human abilities, and that dedicated research was needed in the joint space between humans and automation. This means that we need to design technology to work with humans, instead of designing cool things and then expecting humans to learn/adapt to clumsy automated gadgets and programs.

What projects are you currently working on?

We are very busy! One of our most publicized projects has been developing an iPhone app to fly a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, see halab.mit.edu). While it is cool to use, our real research goal was to develop a control architecture that anyone could use on any mobile platform with minimal training. We recently ran an experiment that showed any person with cell phone skills can learn to fly our vehicles in three minutes without crashing. This is important since currently, many organisations require fully rated pilots to fly UAVs. Now we are showing that this expense is simply not needed.

And some of our most interesting research right now is boring – literally! One problem that is cropping up in many areas is how boring it is when people supervise systems with a lot of autonomy – like pilots of commercial airplanes in the en route phase or nuclear power plant operators. Also, UAV pilots get very bored, especially when they loiter for hours watching a target below. We are trying to develop predictive models that tell us under what conditions people’s performance will decline due to boredom and how we can use automation to keep people engaged. We also have projects designing decision support tools for robotic forklifts, trains, nuclear power plants, and commanders of complicated environments like aircraft carriers and submarines!

What would you say has been your biggest achievement so far – either in the lab, navy or otherwise?

[caption id="attachment_23431" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Missy Cummings"][/caption]

This is really a hard question. I think landing a plane on an aircraft carrier by myself is a huge achievement and certainly a defining event in my life. But every time one of my students graduates from MIT, I am immensely proud, both because of the work that he or she has done on an individual research project, but also that I have helped a bright mind become even brighter.  All of my students will go on to greater achievements, and so my impact on the world grows immensely when my students go out into the world.

To see a clip of Missy’s iPhone app in operation, check out MAV-VUE: Scenes from Usability under Lab News Recommends.