Internship: Seeing and Hearing – Validating New Workload Assessment Techniques

The goal of this internship is to validate novel techniques for assessing mental workload in operational contexts. Understanding and measuring mental workload is essential to improve human-system collaboration and to design systems that adapt to the operator’s cognitive state. This internship focuses on validating non-intrusive methods that can provide reliable workload measures in real time.

Description
Your study will explore and validate mental workload assessment techniques beyond traditional approaches. Specifically, you will work on prosodic analysis (e.g. changes in loudness and tone of voice) and video-based analysis of subjects’ faces (e.g. changes in facial colour as indication of heart rate variability and eye blink frequency). Workload will be manipulated by means of an NLR-adjusted version of the computer game Tetris, which allows fine-grained control of task difficulty. As an intern, you will contribute to the experimental design, carry out the experiment with participants, and analyse the collected data. Of course, you will be supported by an NLR supervisor. Depending on the type of internship, this work can be extended into a master thesis.

Tasks to be foreseen:

• Contribute to the design of an experiment;

• Execute the experiment with participants;

• Analyse multimodal data (voice, video, behavioural performance);

• Report and present your findings;

• Provide recommendations for follow-up research and applications.

Duration

This fulltime internship can start October 1st (later is possible) and the duration will be 3 to 9 months (ideally five or more).

Requirements

• Master student in Cognitive Psychology, Human Factors, Biomedical Engineering, AI, or equivalent;

• Interest in the area of measuring the cognitive human;

• Good communication skills;

• Experience with experimental design or signal processing is a plus, but not required.

What we offer

• A challenging graduation project/internship in a high-tech, aerospace-orientated work environment;

• Informal culture with room for personal initiative;

• Supervision from experts in the field;

• Internship results to be used in current and future projects;

• An internship allowance.

About NLR

Royal NLR has been the ambitious research organisation with the will to keep innovating for over 100 years. With that drive, we make the world of transportation safer, more sustainable, more efficient and more effective. We are on the threshold of breakthrough innovations. Plans and ideas start to move when these are fed with the right energy. Over 950 driven professionals work on research and innovation. From aircraft engineers to psychologists and from mathematicians to application experts.

NLR’s operator performance group has a wide range of both academic and practical knowledge on operator performance and human factors (HF) in complex environments. Operator-in-the-loop studies are performed to measure the manner in which personnel conduct themselves in an operational setting (either simulated or realistic). The assessment includes operator performance aspects such as (crew) workload, (team) situation awareness, usability, visual perception, vigilance, and (eye) fatigue. Data is gathered objectively (e.g. heart rate and eye-tracking) and subjectively (e.g. through interviews, workshops and questionnaires).

Our colleagues are happy to tell you what it’s like to work at NLR.

Interested?

Send your application, together with your motivation letter and CV by clicking the ‘apply’ button! Do you have some questions before applying?

You can contact:

• Maykel van Miltenburg, R&D Engineer, maykel.van.miltenburg@nlr.nl, 088-5113389

• Rolf Zon, Senior Scientist, rolf.zon@nlr.nl, 0885113190