• Ph.D. (Cognitive Psychology & Cognitive Science), Certificate in Modeling in Cognitive Science, Indiana University, 1999.
• M.S. (Computer Science), Indiana University, 1993.
• B.S. (Computer Science & Psychology), Taylor University, 1990.

Honors and Professional Societies

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pre-doctoral fellowship entitled "Modeling in Cognition" (T32 MH19879-04), 7/96-6/97.

Cognitive Science Fellowship, Cognitive Science Department, Indiana University 1993.

American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Association of Computing Machinery.

Summary

Dr. David Diller is a Senior Scientist at BBN Technologies. His current focus includes cognitive modeling, mixed-initiative agent-based systems, and simulation-based training applications. Recently, Dr. Diller has been involved in a number of projects utilizing commercial game technology for training applications.

Highlights

Dr. Diller is the Program Manager for an ONR-funded effort examining the utility of commercial gaming technology for human behavior modeling and training applications. He is currently the co-PI on the DMSO project studying the impact of culture and personality on warfighters, using simulation games. He was one of the architects for BBN's project under the DARPA DARWARS program, developing an architecture and infrastructure for advanced training applications. Within the DARWARS project, he is currently the technical lead for the DARWARS Ambush! project, which is developing MOUT training exercises based on a multi-player commercial game. As PI for the T-CAST program (Team Coaching Assistant for Simulation-Based Training), he is developing with Aptima, Inc. an intelligent coaching solution for simulation-based teamwork training within a massively multiplayer (MMP) game-based training environment. Currently the project is focused on training for small dismounted infantry teams within a MOUT environment.

Dr. Diller has extensive experience developing human performance models and agent-based systems. As technical leader for the Enhancing the Usability of Computer Generated Forces project, he developed, with Aptima, Inc., a prototype training system for AWACS Air Weapons Officers, including human performance models of pilots and instructors. Dr. Diller was technical lead for BBN's project under the DARPA Mixed Initiative Control of Automa-teams (MICA) program, where he developed real-time decision aids enabling operators to control teams of unmanned aerial vehicles. As lead developer on the TeamLeader project in the DARPA Coordination of Agent Based Systems program, he developed mixed-initiative approaches to controlling heterogeneous agent teams.

As part of the Mixed-Initiative Agent Team Administration (MIATA) working group he developed a mixed-initiative agent team simulation of the US planning and execution in response to the Hurricane Mitch disaster using BBN's OMAR/Lisp-based simulation environment. As part of the Agent-based Modeling and Behavioral Representation (AMBR) project sponsored by the Human Effectiveness Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Dr. Diller was involved in the design and development of experiments examining human category learning under multi-tasking conditions, and responsible for the development of a testbed designed to gather empirical data on both humans and behavior models. As part of the GAMAT project, sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, he developed an Agent Management Toolkit, designed to support the development, maintenance, and use of agents at both the Human Computer Interface and Application Services Layers. As part of this effort, Dr. Diller and a small team of developers created a Java version of BBN's OMAR/Lisp-based simulation environment.

Dr. Diller was also involved with the prototyping and development of the CAMPS Advanced Airlift Scheduler project sponsored by Rome Laboratory.

Prior to working at BBN Technologies, Dr. Diller was involved in the development of a number of commercial knowledge-based systems, including a help-desk system designed to assist technical support staff diagnose hardware and chemical problems in Hitachi blood analyzers (Boehringer Mannheim Corp.), a rule-based system designed to recommend life insurance underwriting decisions regarding insurance policies (Gateway Information Services), and a Space Communications Scheduler program designed for the Space Station Freedom (General Electric Advanced Technology Lab). Responsibilities have included knowledge extraction, representation, and verification as well as model design, development, and evaluation.

As a research assistant to Dr. Richard Shiffrin at Indiana University, Dr. Diller conducted basic research exploring the effects of attention on visual information processing, computational models of human recognition and cued recall memory processes, and eye movement tracking during visual information processing. His work led to the development of the ARC-REM computational model of human memory.