Happy to meet you, I am Jonas, PhD and Engineer in Neuroergonomics and Aeronautic. I am currently working at FREQUENTIS, Vienna (Austria). We specialize in solutions for control rooms in many different environments. Here no kangaroos, but enough motivation for leaps toward a safer world.
If my profile interests you or if you have any question, do not hesitate to contact me, I will always feel honored!
About me
"Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again." - Ben Shneiderman
Neuroergonomics
Neuroergonomics is a young field that aims to use latest neuroscience models to study ergonomics. Far from being another trend, crossing those fields allows us to explore new aspects of human factors.
Human Machine Interaction
I firmly believe that all is interaction. From working on your computer to reading a map - and even cursing your shower because it is too hot - we all interact with systems and processes in our daily life.
Aeronautics
Being more environmentally friendly and offering higher safety are the two major goals that aeronautics has to tackle during the 21st century. I concentrate on the latter and its HMIs.
Portfolio
"User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project." - Donald Norman
Remote Towers
Solution Architecture
Aging and cognition
Data analysis
Inattention at work
PhD thesis
Multiple Remote Towers
HMI Design
R++, the next step
Software Interface Design & Management
Djnn & Smartwatch
Compiler Programming
PPrWatcher
Application Interface Design
Race Game
Articial Intelligence Programming
Schooling Website
Website Developement
Student Aerospace Challenge
Airport Study & Management
Experience
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" - Søren Kierkegaard
2010 - 2012
A Painful Departure
After my French A-level, I decided to go to CPGE training (tough preparation to competitive national exam) in maths and physics. I saw the extent of human knowledge, and how small I was.
2012 - 2015
An Appreciated Reward
I decided to join the ENAC (French National Aviation University), following my interest for planes. In there, I discovered many different areas within aviation - UAVs, ATM and airports. I found also a passion for computer science which I developped thanks to school and personal projects.
Summer 2014
Internship at the IIL
In order to acquire some experience within Human Machine Interaction, I joined the Interactive Informatics Laboratory of ENAC. I had the honor of working with skillful scientists who taught me a lot. I found there my conviction that "everyhing is interaction", thanks to my tutor Stephane Chatty.
2014 - 2015
Dual Degree in HMI
I decided to specialize in HMI by following the HMI Master, the only HMI schooling in France focusing on interaction developement. I studied design, prototyping and met a lot of people amazingly inspiring.
2015
Internship at Frequentis
To discover new cultures, I decided to do my last internship abroad. I found in Frequentis the perfect subject to put into practice all my schooling in ATM and HMI. All this was even more interesting in the wonderful city of Vienna.
2015 - 2018
PhD in Neuroergonomics
After much thought I decided that it was the best choice considering my will to understand humans better in order to adapt machines to operators (and not the contrary).
Winter 2018
Data Analyst at CNRS
I discovered during my PhD that data analysis was something I enjoyed, particularly within public research environment.
2019 - 2021
Neuroergonomics specialist at APSYS
To connect again with aeronautical aeronautical context, I joined APSYS in the young Human Factors team. There, I worked as the neuroergonomic specialist of a multidisciplinary team, allowing me to work on inspired projects while still learning from collegues.
2021 - Now
Solution Architect at FREQUENTIS
For family reasons, I moved to Vienna (Austria). I (re)joined FREQUENTIS in the Tower Automation Offering team. Here, I discuss with clients during or after offer phase to answer as many requirements as possible by designing a robust, safe and understandable architecture.
Let Me Be
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Contact Me
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." - Carl Jung
Questions, remarks, proposals: do not hesitate, as I will always answer whatever you want to discuss about. I normally answer within two days, except in emergency situations (e.g. holidays).
Design of the system architecture in the Remote Tower field
In short, my job as a Solution Architect is about providing high-level description of our systems (software and/or hardware) in the context of the problems it solves for our clients. To do so, the first step is to always stay close to our clients (either current or potential ones) to fully comprehend insight on their use- and business-cases. I try to gain as much information as needed on their philosophy, their constraints, the local laws, and - most importantly - their requirements to be able to design the frame of our solution. The next step is to discuss internally with Frequentis many experts in each field (software, hardware, network, HMI, product teams, safety, security...) to exchange what each requirement means in the particularly area it pertains, and estimate its impact on the overall architecture. Finally, I design multiple views of our solution architecture depending on the points I want to put forward.
Even though these steps generally take place during the offer phase, I also follow the architecture evolution during the project phase after we have won. I ensure that the overall systems architecture remains robust, explainable and safe.
The previous description is the standard activities I have as solution architect, however at Frequentis I also regularly perform other tasks, depending on the team's needs. I worked on physical ergonomics of the Air Force (USA) Remote Tower, the architecture of the DSNA (France) solution, the use-cases for NAVIAIR (Denmark), and the homogeneity of all our products HMIs. Finally, I also supervised two internships (4 and 6 months).
Data analysis for uncovering the influence of aging on cognition
Older adults improve their cognitive performance on a target task after succeeding on a prior task. We tested whether effects of prior-task success occur via changing older adults’ ability to select the better strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently.
I was tasked with analyzing data in accordance with our hypothesis. Considering the amount of participants (160), I adopted ANOVA parametric test for statistical investigation, while always reporting error measure (mean squared error) and effect size (partial eta-square) to ease future comparison with other studies. I also investigated mediation of strategy use on the link between group and deviation from the correct answer. I chose the PROCESS algorithm (Model 4) within SPSS for his widely accepted robustness and the flexibility offered by the multiple models.
Both groups increased their performance on computational estimation following success on dot comparison. Older adults improved most and outperformed young adults following prior-task success. Prior-task success led older adults to select the better strategy more often, to repeat (or not) the same strategy more often when it was appropriate. Better strategy use mediated effects of prior-task success. Individual differences in baseline performance moderated individuals’ sensitivity to effects of prior-task success.
The present findings that age-related differences in cognitive performance and strategies are modulated by prior-task success have important implications on understanding and studying cognitive aging. Effects of prior-task success suggest that the influence of aging on cognitive processes does not occur independently of the situation in which these processes are executed. As a consequence, different conclusions can be drawn if effects of aging on a given set of processes are assessed without taking into account the context in which these processes are executed.
PhD thesis on the influence of inattention in automatized environments
Higher levels of automation are progressively integrated in critical environments to satisfy the increasing demand for safer systems. Such philosophy moves operators to a supervisory role, also called out-of-the-loop (OOTL) situations. Unfortunately, OOTL situations also create a new kind of human-machine interaction issues, called OOTL performance problem. The dramatic consequences of OOTL performance problem stress the need to identify which mechanisms could influence their appearance. The emergence of thoughts unrelated to the here and now, labeled mind wandering (MW), could affect operators in OOTL situations through the perceptual decoupling induced.
This thesis investigates MW dynamic in OOTL situations and its influence on operators. We firstly reviewed the evidences in the literature underlining a link between OOTL performance problem and MW. We completed theoretical insights by reporting pilots’ tendency (collected with a questionnaire) to encounter more problems with autopilots when experiencing more task-unrelated MW. Then, we conducted three experiments in OOTL conditions using an obstacle avoidance task. With non-expert population and sessions longer than 45 minutes, we observed a significant increase of MW in OOTL situations compared to manual conditions, independently of system reliability. MW episodes were also accompanied by a perceptual decoupling from the task induced by task-unrelated MW. This decoupling was visible on reports of mental demand as well as oculometric (pupil size, blinks) and encephalographic (N1 component, alpha activity) signals.
Overall, our results demonstrate the possibility to use physiological markers of MW in complex OOTL environments. We discuss new perspectives towards the use of MW markers to characterize the OOTL performance problem. Instead of blindly stopping MW episodes, which could have benefits for operators, future research should focus on designing systems able to cope with MW and identify information needed to facilitate the reentry in the control loop when needed.
Older adults improve their cognitive performance on a target task after succeeding on a prior task. We tested whether effects of prior-task success occur via changing older adults’ ability to select the better strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently.
Category: data analysis, experimental design, scientific paper writing, conferences presentation
Remote Tower
Definition of a working concept for Remote Towers in Air Traffic Management
Remote Tower concept is one of the key innovation topics in ATC. It is addressing cost issues at small and regional airports by applying a new operation concept and operate such airports from a remote tower centre. The main idea of such concept is to share controller resources between airports and enable controller to operate multiple airports in sequence or parallel mode.
In a first step the existing user interface concept which was developed for single remote tower shall be used as a baseline and shall be extended to enable switching mode operations between different remote airports from one working position. Therefore operational reference scenarios should be defined (by using SESAR OPS Concept and inputs from other ANSPs). Based on this reference scenarios an HMI mockup shall be created to enable validation of these scenarios. In an iterative process the concept shall be refined and feedback cycles from internal and external experts should be applied.
Conception and development of a next generation statistical software
R, an open source statistical processing software widely used, has a significant number of extensions to handle any data and use all the latest statistical tools, but offers only limited usability and austere Human-Machine Interface. The "R ++, the next step" project aims to build on the power and flexibility R to create a language similar but modernized (object concepts, parallelization, Big Data). In addition to the language, the R++ project aims to provide a software directly supported on the eponymous language, proposing a usable GUI, modern and pleasant.
Our role in this project was to design the interface of R++ software. Meetings with users gave us a complete understanding of the needs of researchers in statistics. Building on this solid foundation, we have listed a set of specifications covering all the needs of users and the client. We then designed a series of paper prototypes through brainstorming, quickly followed by a second integrating the graphics we developed. These prototypes were used to conduct usability tests. This done, we could think of the architecture of our software to program the last in the chosen language (Java accompanied by JavaFX graphics library).
Category: Software Interface Design and Development, Management
Djnn & Smartwatch
Compiler programming and study on pilot possibles uses of smartwatches
The project was divided into three parts. First it was necessary to understand how the Pebble - chosen smartwatch - was functioning, and how to program with the Pebble library. The second part was to develop a compiler between a new interface oriented language - Djnn - and the Pebble library. Finally, the final part was to understand how smartwatches could be used to warn pilots during the flight.
Conception and developement of a smartphone app for UAV safety pilot.
During the flight of a civilian UAV, safety operator is needed to regain control if an incident happens. This operator can sometimes be embarrassed to see the drone : masking object, UAV far away... This problem is a safety issue, for the drone and for people around.
Within Paparazzi UAV project, we designed a smartphone application to locate the drone and display information necessary for the decision. After gathering pilot needs, we decided to structure our app in 3 screens. First one allows overall view of UAVs, following Ben Shneidermann's creed "Overview first". The second displays smartphone's camera view with enhanced features showing UAV, to help locate them. The last screen sum up all flight data in a form close to Primary Flight Display system (used in all commercial airplanes).
I did this project with Juliette Rambourg, make sure to check her awesome website too !
As practical for ADA language schooling, We developed a turn based race game with a user interface and keyboard controls. We also programmed an AI with the Negamax algorithm, so that up to 8 human and computer players could play together.
Design and development of a new version of ENAC Master IHM.
The HMI Master of ENAC and Paul Sabatier University is the only Master in France providing HMI schooling although being development oriented. It is well-known nationally and abroad (as example it is the first result on Google). This schooling has already a website up to date. However, acording to the deputy head Yannick Jestin, maintenance is difficult and design could be improved. He proposed us to conduct a revision of the website to better reflect the expectations of users and support the visibility of the master.
How to integrate a private spaceport into air traffic flow?
The Student Aerospace Challenge originates from the will of the aerospace industry and the student associations to tighten their ties by conducting a large scale federating project.
The Challenge proposed by the ACE allows the students to participate to the study of a suborbital spaceplane. This is a reusable vehicle which will reach Mach 3.5 and 100 km of altitude, the edge of space. The study of different aspects of the VSH project is proposed: propulsion, avionics, maintenance, legal aspects, etc. The students will work in close collaboration with the aerospace industry and are asked to produce innovating solutions. The students selected for the Student Aerospace Challenge will enjoy the privilege of participating to a large scale project which takes part in the present evolution of aerospace systems. This project exists since 2011 thanks to companies like Dassault, Airbus, Thales, Cosmica Spacelines and many others.
In this context, we developped the working package dedicated to airport and spaceport questions. We had firstly to study a suborbital flight model to define its impact on air traffic flow. On a second part, we listed all possible changes needed for a spaceport to operate suborbital spacecrafts (regulation, facilities, public reception). Thanks to those studies, we were able to search for an French airport likely to host such spaceport. We finally designed in 3D all facilities needed in a perfect scenario.
