The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by NSF. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This award fulfills part of that aim. Algorithmic advances in artificial intelligence are transforming human work in diverse areas including transportation, finance, national security, and medicine. Machine intelligence presents opportunities to increase human work productivity and the quality of jobs through augmenting human capabilities. Effective teaming between humans and intelligent machines similar to effective human-human teamwork has the potential to yield significant near-term gains. This project explores the challenges of human-machine teaming in medical decision making. Health care is one of the most difficult challenges that the United States is facing. The US spends $3 trillion dollars in health care each year, while medical error is the third leading cause of death. Human-machine cognitive teaming creates a new model of patient care in which providers team with intelligent cognitive assistants to enhance quality of care under time pressure, taxing workloads, and uncertainties in medical conditions. This project explores the potential for effective human-machine teaming to mitigate such challenging problems in health care.
Specifically, this project seeks to understand (1) whether human-machine teaming can benefit medical decision making and decision making in other related high stakes domains; (2) the guiding principles for designing effective human-machine teams; (3) barriers that currently exist for building such teams; (4) novel solutions needed to address barriers in order to develop highly performant teams; and (5) the economic and societal impacts of the planned approach for human-machine teaming. Understanding effective human-machine teaming, including the broader implications in the workspace and in human workflows, will contribute to positive transformation of human work. In particular, it is anticipated that the outcomes of this project will result in improvements in hospital utilization and reduction of medical errors. The project integrates multiple disciplinary perspectives, including computer science, medical expertise, health policy, and decision making. The impacts of the research will extend to multiple hospitals in the Baltimore region. Furthermore, the project will engage local high school students in summer research experiences, and the outcomes of the research will be integrated into undergraduate curricula.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
