I interviewed Ben Hellar. Ben is a 4th year Ph.D. student who is also advised by David Hall.
Ben wasn't in the inaugural class as an undergrad at the School of IST at Penn State, but he was in the very next class. He was in the first recruited class at IST. Ben has seen the College grow from its infancy, move into its new building and create its undergrad program from scratch. If you ripped into the walls of the IST building - you'd find his signature on an I-beam somewhere inside - literally!
Ben was a Schreyer Honors College undergraduate. He completed an honor's thesis and took many honors courses while an undergrad. He even pursued the combined Bachelor's/Masters program for a time, but found that his interests were more aligned with the Ph.D. program than the Masters, so he graduated with his B.S. and entered the Ph.D. program. His original adviser was Dr. John Bagby.
Ben spent his first two years of graduate life finding his topic and interests. He has now found a home with Dr. Hall and Dr. McNeese where he looks at Human Performance Simulation, especially in crisis management, military situations and those that require formalized C3 (Command, Control and Communications).
Ben is currently working on the NeoCities simulation project. This project simulates Police, Fire and HazMat crisis management dispatch and resource allocation. He's studying team decision making and collaboration, especially of dispatchers and decision makers who would manage crises. While the tasks are oversimplified, they are done that way to specifically study the interactions of the people involved. The output of his research would fit into models for Homeland Security, the military, and crisis management organizations. Ben's dissertation will be focused on the overload problem in regards to the pace of events that occur.
Ben has published three conference papers. Two were born out of his literature review. He has presented twice at the National Symposium on Data Fusion and Sensing and once at the Cyber Situational Awareness conference at GMU. The second conference had a "tougher audience". These attendees were more technical and entrenched in the "T" part of the ITP triangle. So, Ben's research was along the lines of the T-P part of the triangle - and it was hard from them to get the idea that you needed to understand the people side of things - or that there even was a people-technology component to consider.
Ben is very different from me in many ways. First off, he is a more traditional student - going to graduate school immediately after (or, technically during) his undergrad experience. He's considering going out into the world to get more experience after he graduates. However, I guess we're really similar in that we both value that real-world, hands-on experience. I think that this will help Ben to focus his future research and make it more applicable by adding the realistic perspective. The order that I have done things is very different, but it really does point to the same thing - we need to combine academics with a reality perspective. Because Ben and I are both Penn State graduates, it will be interesting to see where we land later in life.
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