Cybernetics team wins award for best SMC journal paper

On October 8th, Max Mulder and his team received the Andrew P. Sage award at the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics in Bari, Italy. The society’s most prestigious award for scientific publications was awarded to the paper “Manual Control Cybernetics: State-of-the-art and Current Trends”, published in the Golden Jubilee Edition of IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems.

The team

An invitation to submit a journal paper for the 25 years jubilee edition of the IEEE SMC Transactions, the most renowned journal in his field, gave Max Mulder the idea to form a team with long-term colleagues René van Paassen (AE) and Erwin Boer (3mE) and some of their former PhD students Daan Pool (AE), David Abbink (3mE), Peter Zaal (AE, now at NASA Ames USA), Frank Drop (Max Planck Institute for Cybernetics & AE) and Kasper van der El (AE). Their combined knowledge and experience gave them a unique perspective on manual control cybernetics research, enabling them to write this award-winning journal paper. “The great thing about it is that our whole team of cyberneticists has been honored for the groundbreaking work in our labs, we are all very proud of this special award”, says Max Mulder.

The paper

The paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art in manual control cybernetics research. Several fundamental shortcomings are identified and a new framework is proposed for bringing theory and methodology to the level required for addressing current real-world issues. The paper states a special focus is required on the adaptive characteristics of human control behavior in realistic control scenarios such as a dysfunctional auto-pilot. The paper was selected as “best journal paper from all 2018 publications” of the SMC journal ‘IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems.