Michael Vignati

• PhD Student

Biography

Michael Vignati is a Senior Research Associate at IHMC and a Ph.D. student in the Intelligent Systems and Robotics program at the University of West Florida. His thesis research focuses on formalizing coordination, its associated mechanisms, and effects, diligently considering both abstract theories and applied domains.

He started at IHMC as an exchange student in early 2011 as part of the KAoS team led by Dr. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw. After graduating from ENSC (École Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique), receiving a master’s degree in cognitive science, he returned to IHMC as a Research Associate. His work is multidisciplinary and often at the human and machine interface. 

He has worked on developing interfaces and tools for the KAoS policy and domain services framework, contributing to a simulation environment using KAoS and policy reasoning for network management and information sharing in U.S. Army tactical environments. 

More recently, his research is split between large-scale data visualization and human-machine teaming. On one hand, he is working on the ‘observatory’, a 3D visualization for large-scale data events with a dual focus on user interaction, and performance optimization techniques. He also works on human-machine teaming and has co-developed “joint activity graphs” with Dr. Matt Johnson to provide formal support for situation awareness in collaborative contexts and pragmatically ground joint activity execution for heterogeneous human-machine teams.