David Mendonça

David Mendonça
	Phone: (973) 596-5212 Fax: (973) 596-5777 Postal Address: Information Systems Dept., GITC 4106 College of Computing Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology 323 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd Newark, NJ 07102 Email: mendonca@njit.edu Spring 2008 Office Hours: Tue, 14:00-16:00, Thu, 15:00-17:00

Brief Bio
David Mendonça is an Associate Professor in the Information Systems Department of the College of Computing Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ. He has a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

Research Interests and Activities
Prof. Mendonça's primary research interests are in modeling and supporting decision making during emergency situations. This work has principally involved research on (1) improvisation, (2) the management of critical infrastructure systems and (3) multicriteria decision making and knowledge management. These areas are discussed below.

Curriculum vitae (current as of 1 January 2008). Most of the papers listed on the CV are located in the directory http://web.njit.edu/~mendonca/papers under the file name listed on the CV. For copies of other papers, please send email to mendonca@njit.edu.

Recent Journal Publications, by Area
Cognition in Improvisation
Mendonça, D. and W.A. Wallace (2007). "A Cognitive Model of Improvisation in Emergency Management." IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part A) 37(4) 547-561 download.

Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2004). "Studying Organizationally-Situated Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events." International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 22(2) 5-29 download.

Decision Support
Mendonça, D., J. Harrald and T. Jefferson (2007). "Emergent Interoperability: Collaborative Adhocracies and Mix and Match Technologies in Emergency Management." Communications of the ACM 50(3) 45-49 download.

Mendonça, D. (2007). "Decision Support for Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events." Decision Support Systems 43(3) 952-967 download.

Mendonça, D. and F. Fiedrich (2006). "Training for Improvisation in Emergency Management: Opportunities and Limits for Information Technology." International Journal of Emergency Management 3(4) 348-363 download.

Mendonça, D., G.E.G. Beroggi, D. van Gent, W.A. Wallace (2006). "Designing Gaming Simulations for the Assessment of Group Decision Support Systems in Emergency Response." Safety Science 44(6) 523-535 download.

Mendonça, D., G.E.G. Beroggi and W.A. Wallace (2001). "Decision Support for Improvisation During Emergency Response Operations." International Journal of Emergency Management 1(1) 30-38 download.

Resilience
Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2006). "Impacts of the 2001 World Trade Center Attack on New York City Critical Infrastructures." Journal of Infrastructure Systems 12(4) 260-270 download.

Other Publications, by Area
Cognition in Improvisation>
Gu, Q. and D. Mendonça (2006). "Group Information Foraging In Emergency Response: An Illustration Incorporating Discrete-Event Simulation." Winter Simulation Conference, Monterey, CA, 3-6 December 2006.

Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2004). "Cognition in Jazz Improvisation: An Exploratory Study." Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, 5-8 August download.

Decision Support
Mendonça, D., Y. Hu and Q. Gu (2007) "Cognitive-level Support for Improvisation in Emergency Response." Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference.

Resilience
Mendonça, D. (forthcoming). "Measures of Resilient Performance," in Remaining Sensitive to the Possibility of Failure. E. Hollnagel, C. Nemeth, S. Dekkers (Eds.). Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, England.

Mendonça, D. and W.A. Wallace (2006). "Adaptive Capacity: Electric Power Restoration in New York City following the 11 September 2001 Attacks." 2nd International Symposium on Resilience Engineering, Nice, France, 8-10 November 2006.

Funded Research

Active Grants
1. "Agents of Change: Improvisation in Emergency Response: Linking Cognition, Behavior and Social Interaction", NSF Grant CMS-0624257, PI: D. Mendonça, Co-PIs: C. Butts (UCI) and G. Webb (OSU). Duration: October 2006-September 2009.
This project constitutes the first large-scale study to investigate improvisation at the nexus of cognitive, behavioral, and social phenomena in emergency response. The case studies for this project are the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, New York.

Large-scale disasters require society to plan for and respond to substantial disruption. As agents of sometimes profound change, disasters require integrated planning and response at multiple levels: at the social level, their complexity requires coordination through communication; at the behavioral level, time pressure creates the need for rapid decision making about response activities; at the cognitive level, uncertainty and rarity require creative thinking. Historical experience has demonstrated the importance of improvisationÑ-serial creativity executed under time constraint-Ñin responding to disasters, and how skill in improvising may complement skill in plan following. Improvisation is often conceptualized as the joint product of cognition, behavior, and social interaction.

This work is expected to lead to improved scientific understanding of improvisation in emergency response, thereby informing educational and policy initiatives to improve how society plans for, responds to, and learns from disasters. The first goal is to explain the cognitive, behavioral and social dynamics of improvisation in emergency response. The second goal is to present and make publicly available the machine-readable data and tools produced by the research project. The third goal is to develop and evaluate tools, techniques, and other materials to support training and policy making regarding improvised response to disaster.

2. CAREER: Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events, NSF Grant CMS-0449582, PI: D. Mendonça. Duration 15 January 2005-14 January 2010.
Extreme events such as natural or technological disasters challenge society's capabilities both for planning and response. As indicated by the long history of extreme event decision making, a key to successful planning and effective response is flexibility. One approach to achieving flexibility is improvisation: a combined behavioral and cognitive activity that requires creativity under tight time constraint in order to meet performance objectives. Work under this CAREER grant consists of integrated research and education programs designed to improve how society understands, plans for and supports improvisation in response to extreme events.

This project has included two supplemental research projects: 2.1International Research and Education in Engineering (IREE): CAREER: Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events", NSF Grant CMS-0449582 (supplemental), PI: D. Mendonça. Duration: summer 2007.
Work under this grant involved replication and extension of the activities being conducted under the above NSF CAREER grant (NSF CMS-0449582). All activities took place in The Netherlands, with base at the Policy Analysis Section of the Department of Multi-Actor Systems within the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology.

2.2 A workshop on defining an agenda for research in the area of information and communication technology for crisis management (workshop web site). This workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation and Delft University of Technology.

Prior Grants
1. SGER: Hurricane Katrina Debris Removal Operations: The Role of Communication and Computing Technologies, NSF Grant CMS-0553080, PI: D. Mendonça. Duration 1 October 2005-30 September 2006.
Background: The nature and quantity of debris following a large-scale disaster can create considerable challenges to cleanup efforts and thus to societal recovery. To enable effective use of communications and computing technologies in such circumstances, it is advisable to have heuristics that can support response personnel in deciding which technologies are most appropriate for supporting various response activities. To this end, this study will observe and develop recommendations on the use of communications and computing technologies in support of debris removal operations following Hurricane Katrina. This work should lead to theoretically-grounded recommendations on how these technologies might better support debris removal operations following large-scale disasters.

2. Decision Technologies for Managing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies, NSF Grant CMS-0301661, PI: W.A. Wallace, CP: J.E. Mitchell, D. Mendonça of RPI. Duration 15 August 2003-30 May 2006
The objective of the research is to improve understanding of and support for the management of interdependent critical infrastructure systems. Infrastructure interdependence occurs when an impact on one infrastructure system results in an impact on one or more other infrastructure systems. The particular focus of the research is on developing techniques that can be used to mitigate against or respond to events that can adversely impact interdependent infrastructure systems.

3. Small Grant for Exploratory Research: Impact of the World Trade Center Disaster on Critical Infrastructure Interdependence. National Science Foundation Grant CMS-0139306, PI: W. A. Wallace, CPs: J. Chow, D. Mendonça. Duration: 1 October 2001-30 September 2003.

Details on Research Activities
1. Cognition in Improvisation
His work on improvisation has involved studies of improvised decision making in various domains, and has included forging links between improvisation in music (especially jazz) and in emergency response. This work has included experimentation with groups of jazz improvisers.

His work on jazz improvisation led to the development of a computational approach to modeling improvisation. Foundational work on this approach was undertaken in experiments with emergency response personnel at the Port of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and at the U.S. National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, MD. This research is leading to advances both in understanding of cognitive aspects of improvised decision making as well as new designs for systems to support improvisation in risky, time-constrained situations. His work in this area was first supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant CMS-9872699 to Professor W.A. Wallace of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Most recently, it is being supported by an NSF CAREER grant, entitled Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events (CMS-0449582). The Ph.D. students working on this project are Qing Gu and Yao Hu (see photo below).

Research Team
Mendonça has been working with five Ph.D. students at NJIT on various projects. Pictured in the photo at right are
Qing Gu: web,
Madhavi Chakrabarthi: web,
Peishih Chang: web, and
Yao Hu.
The fifth student, Ali Cirik, is not pictured.
One of the major initiatives in this group has been the development of the EMPROV online workspace (emprov.njit.edu). Indeed, this workspace provides a mechanism for data collection and analysis, for the the distribution of results and for communication between the research team, study participants and the larger community of scholars.
For the two years, the team has also been active in undertaking preliminary work in computational cognitive modeling within the ACT-R cognitive architecture.

2. Critical Infrastructure Management
This work includes a project on emergency response decision making during the response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The main goals of this research are to understand impacts of the attack on connections among various infrastructure systems in lower Manhattan and to develop visual tools for supporting the restoration of critical services provided by these infrastructures . This work was supported by NSF SGER CMS-0139306, Impact of the World Trade Center Disaster on Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies, with fellow investigators Professors W.A. Wallace and J.H. Chow of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A follow-up study, Decision Technologies for Managing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies, was supported by National Science Foundation Grant CMS-0301661, with fellow investigators Professors W.A. Wallace and J. Mitchell of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, along with Earl "Rusty" Lee. The NJIT Ph.D. student working on this project is Madhavi Chakrabarty (see photo below). A paper on this work was presented at the 2004 IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE-SMC) Conference in The Hague, The Netherlands.

The second study concerns recovery and cleanup operation following the attack. This study investigates decisions concerning the placement, use and management of debris removal equipment in the first one hundred days following the attack. He is exploring the impact of risk on these decisions, and how decision making about equipment influenced the project's effectiveness and efficiency. One undergraduate student, Louis Calabrese, assisted with this work. A paper on this work was presented at AMCIS 2004 (A. Hendela, co-author); another was presented at the Amercian Society of Civil Engineers 2005 Structures Congress (co-authors D. Peraza and P. Stefan). A related project, on thhe use of computing and communications technology during debris removal following Hurricane Katrina, was undertaken with support from NSF grant CMS-0553080.

Other Work
Prof. Mendonça is also intererested in mathematical modeling as an approach to structuring and supporting human decision making. He has done related work on integrating knowledge, in the form of graphical representations, to help groups develop consensus representations of problem situations. He is an author, with M. Raghavachari, of a paper on multicriteria decision methods for tournament-like competitions. A follow-up paper with M. Raghavachari and Ph.D. students Peishih Chang and Xiang Yao was presented at the 2004 Decision Sciences Institute conference.
In the area of knowledge elicitation and management, he is currently working on the development and validation of methods for ontology creation. One paper on this work (with Pushkala Venkataraman) has thus far been published . A second project concerns online search behavior in e-commerce and implications for knowledge management. The Ph.D. student on this project is Peishih Chang. A paper on this work was presented at AMCIS 2004.

Teaching Activities
CIS 786: Statistical Computing
This course is a practical and project-oriented introduction to quantitative methods in information systems research (here is the draft syllabus). The focus of the course is on developing researchers¹ capability to select and implement appropriate statistical procedures for a variety of research questions and to interpret the results of these procedures. The course makes extensive use of existing data sets (usually provided by faculty members) from information systems-related research projects.

CIS 658: Multimedia Information Systems
Multimedia software systems incorporate various media, such as text, images, video and audio, to provide rich experiences for users. This is a course in the design, implementation and evaluation of multimedia systems. The course has three major content areas and goals: (1) multimedia data types-the goal being to understand the development and use of various multimedia data types; (2) usability and user modeling-the goal being to incorporate theories of human perception and cognition into the design and evaluation of multimedia systems; and (3) multimedia design and software tools-the goals being to plan and develop multimedia projects and to be aware of ways in which multimedia is being used in the public and private sectors.

CIS 441: Geographic Information Systems
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow individuals and organizations to pose, explore and answer a variety of public- and private-sector questions using spatial data. In this course the student will learn to identify, manipulate and analyze spatial data using state-of-the-art software. The course is project-driven and hands-on: students will define and address real problems using real data. The course will also cover selected topics in information visualization as they relate to the use of geographic information systems. The course syllabus and this flyer provide more detail.

CIS 465: Advanced Information Systems
This is a course on how to model and make decisions about information systems and information technology. The emphasis on the first part of the course is on recognizing, describing, analyzing, and designing information systems for business applications. The second part of the course aims to obtain a more detailed understanding of the nature of problem solving and decision-making, particularly as it applies to the design and use of information technology.

Links
Graciosa. Viva Fenais. A live view of Santa Cruz.
Peabody. The exact pronunciation is a local secret.
Amherst. The "h" is completely silent.
Oxford. Manual lawn care.
Pittsburgh. Home of Crawford Grill.
Delft. Oude kaas.
Alexandria
Troy and early work by RPI alumni, which includes this bridge.
Newark, including these views of old Newark and the Morris canal, which skirted the area that is now the NJIT campus.

Research Team Mendonça has been working with five Ph.D. students at NJIT on various projects. Pictured in the photo at right are Qing Gu: web, Madhavi Chakrabarthi: web, Peishih Chang: web, and Yao Hu. The fifth student, Ali Cirik, is not pictured. One of the major initiatives in this group has been the development of the EMPROV online workspace (emprov.njit.edu). Indeed, this workspace provides a mechanism for data collection and analysis, for the the distribution of results and for communication between the research team, study participants and the larger community of scholars. For the two years, the team has also been active in undertaking preliminary work in computational cognitive modeling within the ACT-R cognitive architecture.
2. Critical Infrastructure Management This work includes a project on emergency response decision making during the response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The main goals of this research are to understand impacts of the attack on connections among various infrastructure systems in lower Manhattan and to develop visual tools for supporting the restoration of critical services provided by these infrastructures . This work was supported by NSF SGER CMS-0139306, Impact of the World Trade Center Disaster on Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies, with fellow investigators Professors W.A. Wallace and J.H. Chow of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A follow-up study, Decision Technologies for Managing Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies, was supported by National Science Foundation Grant CMS-0301661, with fellow investigators Professors W.A. Wallace and J. Mitchell of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, along with Earl "Rusty" Lee. The NJIT Ph.D. student working on this project is Madhavi Chakrabarty (see photo below). A paper on this work was presented at the 2004 IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE-SMC) Conference in The Hague, The Netherlands.
	The second study concerns recovery and cleanup operation following the attack. This study investigates decisions concerning the placement, use and management of debris removal equipment in the first one hundred days following the attack. He is exploring the impact of risk on these decisions, and how decision making about equipment influenced the project's effectiveness and efficiency. One undergraduate student, Louis Calabrese, assisted with this work. A paper on this work was presented at AMCIS 2004 (A. Hendela, co-author); another was presented at the Amercian Society of Civil Engineers 2005 Structures Congress (co-authors D. Peraza and P. Stefan). A related project, on thhe use of computing and communications technology during debris removal following Hurricane Katrina, was undertaken with support from NSF grant CMS-0553080.
Other Work Prof. Mendonça is also intererested in mathematical modeling as an approach to structuring and supporting human decision making. He has done related work on integrating knowledge, in the form of graphical representations, to help groups develop consensus representations of problem situations. He is an author, with M. Raghavachari, of a paper on multicriteria decision methods for tournament-like competitions. A follow-up paper with M. Raghavachari and Ph.D. students Peishih Chang and Xiang Yao was presented at the 2004 Decision Sciences Institute conference. In the area of knowledge elicitation and management, he is currently working on the development and validation of methods for ontology creation. One paper on this work (with Pushkala Venkataraman) has thus far been published . A second project concerns online search behavior in e-commerce and implications for knowledge management. The Ph.D. student on this project is Peishih Chang. A paper on this work was presented at AMCIS 2004.