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 The School of Information Sciences
is proud to announce that Michael Lewis has been promoted
to Full Professor as of July 2006. The faculty,
staff and students at SIS offer their congratulations
to Lewis, who has been a member of the SIS faculty
since 1987. Lewis came to Pitt after earning
his Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Engineering
Psychology (Human Factors) from Georgia Tech. His research
is focused on human interaction with intelligent automation.
Lewis has designed, developed, and implemented a research
program in Human Factors along with an evolving curriculum
that keeps pace with the state-of-the-art. His
research efforts led to the founding (with the late
Dr. Korfhage) of Pitt’s Usability Laboratory
in 1996 and the Virtual Theater (a virtual reality
facility) in 2003. Lewis’ research has
been supported by the National Science Foundation,
Office of Naval Research (ONR), Air Force Office of
Scientific Research, Air Force Research Laboratory
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
among others. Lewis has more than 125 publications
to his credit, and he has developed widely-used research
tools in virtual reality, robotics, and military simulation.
Lewis’ current NSF grant addresses the problem
of controlling teams of mobile robots for urban search
and rescue (USAR). In this project, Lewis is
investigating control and coordination problems with
both real physical robots and in simulation. His
robotic team, which relies on coordination among multiple
robots and an innovative user interface and control
regime (rather than expensive hardware) placed third
in the RoboCup US Open in 2004 and 2005, placed first
in the category of Autonomy in 2005 and 2006, and first
in Mobility in 2005. Lewis’ work has led to the
development of a high fidelity simulator that allows
many different types of robotic platforms to be simulated
and controlled. It has also led to the creation of
the Virtual Robots competition in the RoboCup Urban
Search and Rescue League, where the simulator is used
as the required computational infrastructure.
This spring, Lewis was part of a team that won a Multidisciplinary
University Research Initiative award to study “Cognition
and Collaboration in Network Centric Operations: Understanding
and Measuring Macro recognition in Teams.” He
mentors four PhD candidates and offers courses on Interactive
Systems Design and Human Factors.
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