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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
2010 Women to Watch
MITRE's Jill Drury bridges human-robot communication
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Jill Drury
Associate department head, multimedia and collaboration department, The MITRE Corp.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in physics, Macalester College; Master’s degree in computer science, Boston University; MBA, Boston University; doctorate in computer science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Noteworthy: Drury is a leader in human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction research, bridging work among industry, academia and government.
You are where you live:
Among the 10 states where Drury lived during her youth, she noted the formidable impact of Richland, Wash. — home of the Manhattan Project development site. “You couldn’t go five feet before tripping over a physicist.” In high school, her family moved to the Chicago area, near the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, setting up more science-oriented field trips.
Defining career move:
Drury moved to the Boston area after college to begin her career at MITRE as a general systems engineer — “which was amusing to me at the time because I didn’t know what that was until I became one.”
The human factor:
When Drury was working for MITRE on assignment in The Netherlands in the 1980s, she researched a problem with a surveillance aircraft communicating information to people on the ground. In seeing people abandoning the more-difficult communication process in favor of a shortcut, albeit a data-corrupting one, she realized the need for technology ease, referred to as human-computer interaction. “How do teams of people work together and what do they need for efficient work? That’s where my collaboration work comes in,” she said.
The robot factor:
Drury has applied her knowledge to human-robot interaction research through MITRE’s internal R&D program. The work has led to her development of design guidelines and techniques, used by other researchers worldwide, for evaluating human direction of robots in safety-critical situations.
30 years at mitre, going strong:
She credits that loyalty to the opportunities presented to her. “My job now isn’t anything like what it was when I first started.” And it’s not like a commercial company that finds its niche making one particular widget. “Government comes to (MITRE) with problems they can’t solve. They’re hard problems and they change over time. Therefore, we’re never asked to do the same thing.”
What makes you tick:
“I like to learn new things. I would’ve been bored at any other company.”
Thoughts on Drury, from Anita King, department head, multimedia and collaboration department, at The MITRE Corp.
“I am constantly in awe of how tireless she is in pursuit of her work.”
“In my mind, Jill’s greatest accomplishment, her legacy if you will, is her influence on the next generation. Whether it is through her teaching of human-computer interaction as an adjunct professor of computer science at UMass Lowell or her mentoring of the junior staff in our department, Jill is constantly helping to nurture the next generation of research scientists in HCI and HRI.”
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