Research

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). Mendonça has been working with Ph.D. students at NJIT on various projects. 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.

3. Multicriteria decision making and knowledge management

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.