April 24, 2024
Photo, left to right: Washington State Representative Gael Tarleton, Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, Human Centered Design & Engineering Professor Mark Haselkorn, and University of Washington's Dean of Engineering Michael B. Bragg.
Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, the U.S. Coast Guard’s commandant and top leader, visited the University of Washington’s department of Human Centered Design & Engineering on July 9, 2015, to learn from researchers from the new Center for Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety and Regional Resilience (CoSSaR).
Michael Bragg, Dean of the UW College of Engineering, welcomed the Admiral to the Pacific Northwest and the University of Washington. Mark Haselkorn, professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, introduced CoSSaR and its flagship project, Maritime Operational Information Sharing Analysis (MOISA). Haselkorn discussed the variety of stakeholders in the Puget Sound region’s maritime safety and security community, and shared the key finding from MOISA’s first year of research: Day-to-day information sharing is driven by relationships and informal networks based on “who you know” and “who you can trust.”
Kate Starbird, a CoSSaR project leader and assistant professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, shared her lab’s latest research on how social media can be leveraged in the wake of crisis events. Starbird also discussed her findings from an analysis of Tweets from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and its implications for future emergency response procedures.
Haselkorn and Washington State Representative Gael Tarleton, a CoSSaR Advisory Board Member, discussed the complex safety and security environment in the Arctic, due to resource competition from several industrialized countries and relationship changes as Artic ice melts. Tarleton stressed CoSSaR's importance as a neutral research center to help promote mutual understanding between various agencies.
Admiral Zukunft toured HCDE’s facilities, visiting the MOISA researchers and students in Starbird’s Emerging Capacities of Mass Participation(emCOMP) Laboratory.
Read more about CoSSaR and its visit from Admiral Zukunft on UW Today »