Comment From the Editor-in-Chief

Diversity, equality, and inclusion have long been central tenets of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES). This commitment is especially evident in the contribution of women scientists and academicians who, over the years, have held prominent positions as HFES past presidents, distinguished fellows, and executive council members. In the past, in a series of articles titled, “First Ladies of HFES,” Past President Francis T. Durso highlighted the distinguished careers of women HFES members who were first to serve in leadership positions for the Society, including, I might add, three former Ergonomics in Design (EID) editors-in-chief. In tribute to the contribution of women to HFES and to the field of human factors and ergonomics (HF/E), this issue opens with an article by Chong and Proctor on the achievements of Lillian Gilbreth and Amelia Earhart. Although this article does not fit into the “design-related” scientific mission of the journal, the overarching message is an important one and relevant to our times as we continue to strive for inclusivity in scientific research and practice. I first learned about Dr. Lillian Gilbreth while pursuing my masters’ degree in industrial engineering. However, I credit my 10-year-old daughter for making me more aware of the exploits and heroism of Amelia Earhart, as she has been collecting stories on her life since first grade. As described in the Chong and Proctor article, Edward C. Elliott, the sixth president of Purdue University, hired industrial engineer Gilbreth and aviator Earhart in 1935 as part of his vision to encourage educational opportunities for women. He did so, even though at that time it was practically unthinkable to consider women for these roles. Elliott’s forward-thinking approach helped to foster scientific progress, and consequently, we have all benefitted from the contributions of these amazing women. The second article presented in this issue picks up the thread from past year’s special issue on “Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Factors Design” – a timely topic with regard to emerging developments in speech recognition, medical diagnosis, predictive analytics, data extraction, and so on. Kamaraj and Lee share their insight on machine learning through research that involves augmenting supervised learning with unsupervised learning and data visualization. The authors present a human-augmented machine learning aided framework to guide data analysts in classifying their data. They tested their framework on a subset of data from the Occupational Information Network database on tasks that might be potentially performed in an automated vehicle. The authors conclude that their augmented methodology could be used to classify big data in a meaningful fashion for optimal and informed decision making. The third article in this issue considers some of the human–technology interaction challenges presented by virtual reality – challenges that have become very apparent in recent years with the exponential growth of new HF/E technologies. In this article, Zhang touches upon the importance of evaluating the authenticity of virtual environments by evaluating three different extraction methods (scale invariant feature transform, local binary pattern, and histogram of oriented gradients) as input for a backpropagation neural network for classifying and recognizing different gestures. Based on the author’s analysis of gesture pictures, the authenticity obtained from the histogram of oriented gradients (such as recognition rate, false acceptance rate, and false rejection rate) was the closest to the original picture. Please watch out for In Practice in the coming issues. In Practice is a new feature of EID, edited by Dr. Anthony Andre. In Practice will showcase the work of HF/E practitioners and focus on delivering key insights, takeaways and lessons learned from their design or procedural applications, concept testing, user research and field work. I hope you find the articles presented in this issue inspiring and informative, and, as always, I welcome your feedback as we move forward in 2021. Best regards,