Computing devices are increasingly used to support many of our daily activities on the move. With this untethering of the computer from the desktop comes a growing need to understand the multitasking strategies that people will adopt, particularly in dynamic, safety-critical environments. In this talk, I shall focus on our recent work that has investigated how people allocate their attention to a secondary task while driving. This work uses a combination of empirical data from controlled studies and computational cognitive modeling to understand peoples' multitasking strategies. The contribution of this work is that it builds a better understanding of how people multitask and highlights the importance of considering the user's objective in design solutions aimed at making the use of mobile devices less egregious in dynamic multitask contexts.

Duncan Brumby is a senior lecturer (associate professor) at University College London, and is currently on sabbatical at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UCL in 2007, he completed a post-doc in the Department of Computer Science at Drexel University and received his Ph.D. from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Dr. Brumby’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and cognitive science, and has investigated problems associated with in-car multitasking, how people manage and recover from interruptions, and how we search the web for information. This work has been published in leading journals and conference proceedings, including Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Human Factors, and the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI conference. His work on multitasking received best paper awards at CHI (2007, 2012), and his work on interactive search is one of the most-cited articles from the Human-Computer Interaction journal 2008-2010.