TBS at the final of the NATO 2020 Innovation Challenge

The collaborative project between Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei, professor at TBS Education, and Julien Meyer, professor at Ryerson University in Canada, has been selected as one of the 10 finalists of the NATO Innovation Challenge for 2020. The experiment will be presented on December 10 during the Pitch Day & Award Ceremony.

What is the challenge about?

The NATO 2020 Innovation Challenge focuses on improving confidence in autonomous systems and reducing risks in their adoption. It is about leveraging innovative ideas to help NATO and other organizations improve their responses to potential crises, thereby ensuring greater security.

An Autonomous System is a very large network or group of networks with a unique routing policy. Soon, autonomous systems are expected to increase exponentially. Using these systems will facilitate the tasks of different organizations, which will be able to fulfill their missions more effectively and reduce the risk for human operators.

This presents problems, especially in terms of the trust, since the use of these systems is new. If there are no operators in charge of directly controlling the actions, there is much concern regarding the danger that human lives could be in or the damage that the equipment would be exposed to. Therefore, the challenge seeks above all to encourage the adoption of these autonomous systems, addressing all the concerns that may arise.

Ologeanu-Taddei and Mayer’s finalist project

Based on a specific scenario provided by the challenge organization, participants had to provide an innovative solution. Ologeanu-Taddei and Mayer’s proposal consists of an online experiment, involving 100 operators, which studies the trust in these autonomous systems.

Their project is based on the hypothesis that the more information the operators have at their disposal, the more confidence they will have in them, making them more efficient and certainly saving more lives. During the experiment, different scenarios were provided to the operators, each with different levels of information and transparency. How they received the information, as well as the amount of it, was decisive in terms of the trust generated in the operators.