Reducing the Cognitive Load of Complex Systems - James Oakes, University of Northampton

This interview took place at the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2019 in London, UK (September, 2019). Conference Website:

I’m a part-time researcher at the University of Northampton (UK), where I’m in my last year of my PhD. My work is focused on the intelligent management of virtualised computer based platforms, using expert (knowledge based) systems to mimic human system administrative/build tasks and automate and manage complex computer platforms more effectively. In additional to my research, I also have over 20 years’ experience working in industry for companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), BT and many more.

Paper Title: Measuring and Reducing the Cognitive Load for the End Users of Complex Systems

Abstract: With the proliferation of complex computer systems, end users face a never-ending increase in the number of tasks, methods, inputs, passwords, usernames (and so on) when using online and standalone computer-based systems and applications. This paper examines a method and approach to measure how complex a system is to use, and how to reduce the complexity of such systems by minimising the requirement for human inputs as much as possible, in order to reduce the cognitive load for that user, or group of users. This paper addresses a study completed around using virtualised computer management systems interfaces of two well-known products AWS (Amazon Web Services), Oracle Cloud, and compares the complexity of the steps and interface for end users to a private cloud less well-known system called the IDE (Intelligent Design Engine). By using a set of derived formula, we examine how this can be applied to systems that have qualitative data feedback from the experiment process, and how to convert this effectively into quantitative data. This data is then analysed numerically using a unique approach to provide additional and meaningful results based of the original end user data.

Cognitive load,Virtualise,Cloud,Intelligent,Expert systems,