E302 - EHF2024 Recap

[00:00:00] Nick Roome: A proper intro. I don't even know who we are anymore. Welcome to Human Factors Cast. This is episode 302. We're recording this live on May 16th, 2024. Like I said, this is Human Factors Cast. I'm your host, Nick Rome. I'm joined today by Mr. Barry Kirby. Hello there. It's been a minute. It has been a minute.

And it's been a minute since we've done a proper show intro. We just hit record and gone with it, but we're back. We're, we got an awesome show for you. I think we're going to talk a little bit about Barry's experience at EHF. And yeah. Let's get into the EHF stuff Barry, do you have anything going on over at 1202 that you want to promote though?

[00:00:36] Barry Kirby: At 1202, we've been doing, whilst we haven't been doing as much on here, I've certainly been doing episodes over there. I think there's probably at least three or four episodes that have come out since we've been having a small hiatus. So I've been talking to National Air Traffic Services about human factors in air traffic control.

I've been looking at cyber human, human vulnerability with Laura Bishop and looking at how they do that from or they look at some insights about how we look at vulnerability from an industry perspective. We have a thing in the UK called the Clinical Human Factors Group. which is a a group that's came together to look at basically how we can better promote human factors in clinical settings.

And so we have the program manager, Dawn Benson having a chat with her. And then the most recent one is looking at. The issue of human facts in healthcare, but looking at it from a transatlantic nature. And so I've been talking to Ken Katchepoll, who's worked on both sides of the pond is currently out in the U S and has been for a number of years and really was really nice to have a discussion with him about all things about human factors on both sides, but I was particularly keen to understand that given the two, and it's something we've spoken about in the past, the two delivery mechanisms, so obviously in the U.

S. it's an insurance based mechanism, in the U. K. it is more of a socialized medicine delivery mechanism, so free at the point of care free at the point of use and I had a bit of a hypothesis in my head that actually, The problems are going to be different because the mechanisms are different, and the hierarchies are different, and that type of thing.

And Ken very quickly disappears me of that notion, that the problems have absolutely the problems over there are very similar to the problems we have in the UK. And actually the, this mechanism about how we pay for it doesn't really factor in the way that I thought it would. So that was brilliant.

That was a absolutely fascinating discussion. So that was out then now, and I'll be trying to push a lot more stuff about bringing a lot of the the older content that we've done in past seasons out in short form. And so pushing that out on where I've got some of the older video where I maybe recorded people with on teams say or zoom rather than the platform and never published that big as a in video content.

I'm now trying to look to see if we can resurrect some of that. And then we've got some, we've got some really interesting, I've been doing some proper prep work because I've got the next three episodes already lined up and in the bag. So yeah, it's been a busy time, but it's been good because I've been able to focus on it and actually try and get some decent content and spend a bit of time or more time in production than I usually would.

[00:03:05] Nick Roome: Excellent. Thanks for the update on that. I'm Very curious to dive in a little bit more. I've been seeing the shorts pop up on my feed. So I've been watching those, but haven't had the time to sit down and listen to the longer form stuff. So maybe I should take a note and do that myself, but yeah, we're here to talk today about EHF.

So you have let's say, what is the EHF? So EHF, this is what the ergonomics, the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, official conference, right? Yes, it is.

[00:03:31] Barry Kirby: Yeah. So it's our annual conference and normally a a two day official program, but there's, but we normally have a third day up front with that allows people to get there.

In the past couple of years we've run a series of sort of master classes. And then in the past couple of years, in particular, we've then added a careers day into that as well. If we've had companies come along on that first day, and we did it two years ago and then we did go along this year, but we didn't exhibit to allow people to come along and, see what career and human factors looks like.

And then also to be able to go off and into the master classes, some of the So some of the masterclasses we were looking at this year is things like predictive workload, safety culture Steve Shorrock, who we've spoken about in the past to talk about talk about that risk assessment and perspective risk assessment with Paul Salmon, who if remember you interviewed him a couple of years ago at HFES And things like that.

So they're quite quite a novel new thing. So it's not a, it's not a lecture. It's not a it's not a paper or such. It's just a, it's a workshop sharing best practice which is fantastic.

[00:04:42] Nick Roome: That's cool. So this was actually a historic one. This was what, 75 years?

[00:04:46] Barry Kirby: This is, this year is the 75th anniversary of the Ergonomics Society.

So historic. It didn't, it was not the CIHF to begin with. It was the Ergonomics Society. In 1949 when it started off. It's evolved a little bit, so it's not, it's now it went from the ergonomics society to the to the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. A bunch of years ago. I dunno exactly when that was.

And then I think it was about in 20. 13, no, 2012, something like that. It then became a chartered Institute. So we got the Royal Charter and so that then be turned into the Chartered Institute of Economics and Human Factors. And so this year, yes, this was the historic conference, but then also later on this year, we were actually having a a festival.

effectively in in Derby in the Museum of Derby, where we having a, an exhibition of all things, human factors. So everything from some practical views on, things that have been made, things that really show off the value of human factors and things. So there's a lot going to go going to be going on this year.

[00:05:52] Nick Roome: That's

[00:05:52] Barry Kirby: very cool. Yes, we have the theme of the 75th running all through the conference. And this, I think, was also exemplified in the number of papers and the number of things that we have. Normally, we have three tracks within the conference of papers. presentations. This year, because so many people applied and the quality was high, that they did, that the conference team decided we're going to put on a fourth track then.

And so we had four tracks, which on the one hand is brilliant, because if you want to get in there, you want to present, or you want to have you want to listen to a whole bunch of papers on your favorite subject or new subject. Then there's lots of choice there. We had everything from nuclear, defense, road, rail, maritime, construction.

There was decent numbers of papers in each of these. And we had two days of solid solid papers which was fantastic fun. Yeah, so we had a whole bunch of that. The, on the Monday, obviously, like I said, we have this master class in the evening on the Monday. I have,

[00:06:55] Nick Roome: hang on, I have a special note here.

Tell me what Monday night entertainment means.

[00:07:00] Barry Kirby: So on Monday night, like I set that up So normally what happens, obviously you've got two evenings, haven't you? You've got to fill with entertainment. The second evening which I'll come back to is always the annual dinner. That is the conference dinner.

It's the formal, but the first night is always some sort of quiz or something like that organized by Tina Worthy. Who's the Chief Operating Officer of the CIHF. And she's been around with the Institute for a long time. And she always puts on some sort of quiz or entertainment or something like that.

So this year it was this this quiz. And basically all we knew was, the title of it was, It's All a Big Mystery. And what they, what she did was set up a whole bunch of code breaking type quizzes. Which was really good fun. So the first half, it was all trying to do all these things.

Now I particularly enjoyed it this year because we won. We, there was a little practice run and we won that and then we went on and won the big thing. Some people were saying it was a bit of a fix because obviously I was the immediate past president and was it something like that. And I was like, there's a time to be magnanimous and say, I shouldn't be taking part in winning these things.

But there's a time to say, actually, I've got the best team. Cause I wasn't really doing much. The, we had the the K sharp team basically around the table. And so it was a bit of K sharp and friends and and they were awesome. We won and I was very proud of them. So that was very, that was cool.

That then led on to a a magician. So the second half of the entertainment was this magician doing his thing which was interesting. The tricks were, tricks were good. But I don't know. I always think that human, I don't know why, but I think human factors groups when it comes to things like that are a tough crowd.

Not easily pleased or quite very inquisitive people trying to work out or get in front of what the tricks are and stuff. So I think anybody who comes to try and do that sort of work with the human factors crowd, you're brave or you just, or you haven't been briefed properly.

[00:08:56] Nick Roome: I feel like the best trick that he pulled off was he made your presidential status disappear.

It, yes, it did that very well. So you had you, longtime listeners of the show. No, you have a unique perspective on the conference and an especially unique one this year, because you were rounding out your tenure as the president of the Chartered Institute. Yeah. And so can you talk through what that experience was like from your perspective?

Cause I know your perspective is going to be a little bit different, but I feel like you have, You know, not your head in the clouds. You, you're a little bit more grounded, so you can view it from the every person's perspective.

[00:09:30] Barry Kirby: This is the compare between this year and last year.

So last year as the sitting president, I had to make sure that I didn't have to make sure all the people, all the really cool people made sure that everything happened. But I. So I welcomed everybody to the conference on the first day, introduced the keynote, did the same on the second day and then, there was bits and bobs that I had to do.

Now we didn't have the the award ceremony last year live, so that was done separately, so that, that was fine. And that's not normally a role of the sitting president anyway. This year now technically I stopped being president at the AGM, which was like the week before, or a couple of weeks before, but this was the point where I could actually hand over the presidential medal to Dr.

Mark Young, who's the Who's the incoming president and he's the president now. And so on the one hand, it was quite neat because on that first that on the Tuesday morning, it was quite nice to stand up and I, got to be the first to after the chief executive to welcome everybody there and then call mark up to hand over the presidential medal and then let him get on with it, knowing I had.

certainly from presidential duties, I had no more responsibilities. That was great. But it was still fantastic though. There was still a lot of people to talk to and engage with and things like that. The, what you then go into, so I'm then now the immediate past president. And my responsibilities then were, I had one really more thing to do, which was on that Tuesday evening.

So for the Tuesday night entertainment, we had the annual dinner which fan, but it's also the annual award ceremony where we get to congratulate the great and the good for doing really good work. And I'm always blown away by the awards themselves, even before I got involved with them at this level, because, firstly, You got, somebody's got to do some good work in order to be nominated in the first place, then somebody else has got to go to that effort of thinking, actually, they did some really good work.

I'm going to nominate them for award. Then, they've got to find a couple of other people who agree with them to then support the award. There's a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes just to get. nominated. Then there's a committee in place that judges all of this stuff, all for somebody to hand over a certificate and a piece of glass or whatever on the night itself.

There's an awful lot of work that goes into what is quite a almost momentary, Thing which I always find fascinating and just the ability to bring an entire community together to celebrate somebody's achievement. I think it's fantastic. So last year, as I said, we did this online as we, cause we have done it online since COVID.

That was one of them things. So this was quite nice to be able to stand up in front of everybody. We did it in three separate rounds. So just before everybody started their dinner, I got to stand up and give out, I think the first four awards. So that was like, so ergonomist new ergonomist of the year, student of the year, things like that.

And so be everybody had to pay attention to be quite otherwise they didn't get fed. Cause they would hold the food. Yeah, pretty much. But again, it was brilliant. It was just the ability to drag these people up on stage, basically have the audience recognize the fantastic work that they did and, appreciate.

what they've done. Did that and then they have the starter, then I do the next three awards, and then they have the main course, then they do the final three awards, I think it was. And so in evolving into sort of lifetime achievement awards and things like that. So that was really good fun.

So that was Being able to almost hold the the audience there while we did that, that was brilliant. That, I think, I was going to say that is a, normally for a president, that's a once in a lifetime experience. Having just said that I've done it twice or that is now my second time for doing that awards and weirdly I'm going to be doing it next year as well.

Oh It's a bit of a glitch in the matrix because the way that because Kobe glitched things up a bit in the way that we did things in Because we now have the AGM before the conference, we used to have the AGM at the conference, and so the transition between president and past president was immediate.

It happened, that was fine. But now it's a couple of weeks earlier, then, yeah, it kind of messes things up a bit. So we've had to change the rules slightly within the organization to allow the past president, who's been in charge of the awards up to this point to then present them. Cause there was a weird glitchy thing, but that we, to make that happen, we had to make that happen next year.

And so as president, I was pushing this through the trustee organization yesterday. We need to do all this now. Hold on a second. This means that I've got to do the awards twice, I've got to do the awards three times. And so that's true, so I've, this year I see it as now my rehearsal year.

Next year I'm going to be amazing. For going forward it will be a that once in a lifetime experience for President to be able to go and do that, that, the handing out of them awards. Which also then meant that once the awards were finished, that, cause I was very good. I didn't whilst there's a lot of wine consumed at these dinners, I didn't really consume any until I'd done them duties.

Cause I think, yeah, make sure that's first. Yeah. Yeah. I'm me falling off the stage or something like that, or just wouldn't go down when I don't think

[00:14:36] Nick Roome: are you kidding me? That would probably be the highlight. That on Tik TOK or something,

[00:14:39] Barry Kirby: I don't know. Oh yeah. Thanks. I don't think anybody was recording video, which was probably a good thing.

But I was again, very proud of my team because we after obviously after the dinner finished we then hung around a bit. We were having a couple of drinks and with different people, other people who come join our table and things like that, which was fabulous. I went to bed or me and Amanda went to bed at something like cause I was presenting the next day anyway.

So we went to bed at about half past one, which I thought was reasonable. We'd had, we had a brilliant time, lovely time. The rest of my team, or most of my team, a couple of them were presenting at the same time as me, so one was presenting earlier than me. So they'd gone to bed slightly earlier.

They were a bit nervous, bless them. So we'd we'd gone to bed at half past one and the rest of the team had all stayed up. In the morning, I wake up, check my phone, and there's people still, on my team, still texting at 4 o'clock in the morning. And I'm like, even by my standards that's impressive.

And then they we then had to go and help them get out of the hotel in time for the to get them out of the rooms to hand them back over. But! They thoroughly enjoyed themselves which was fantastic. Yeah, so that's all of the, I guess that's all the social aspects and then my roles in doing that.

And I guess that takes us to. I guess the main bit, why people go to conference the content.

[00:15:54] Nick Roome: Yeah, I was going to say, so you hit all my questions there. It's almost like you're looking at my same notes, but you're not. So I guess the next question on my list here for you is talk about.

Did you have a chance to really sit down and attend a lot of these things or was it more like in your role as president or past president did you take a look at things more thematically in terms of organizing the tracks or like, how did all that work? Did you, do you have a chance to get down in the trenches?

[00:16:23] Barry Kirby: Yeah, I ironically will go on to the importance of the word trenches in a moment, but the yes I quite enjoyed this one because I could go and just go and sit in some of the presentations. I'm quite one of these people. I'm sure we all are, but you sit down when you see the the itinerary come up the the program and you sit there, right?

I want to go and see about that. Topic I want to go and see about that presentation. I want to go and listen to this person talk and so we went to didola and what I've learned in the past is as much as All the talk should start and finish at the same time so you can flip between tracks if you want to It can be quite hard work unless you really want to do it.

So I've and I think I picked this up a couple of years ago what I try and do on the whole He's rather than go and sit in stuff I already know about to try and grow that bit, I go and sit in things that I don't know very much about at all, to try and go and learn almost where I could apply what I do elsewhere, or where can I pick up cool lessons outside of my comfort zone.

And so the ones I tried to hit this year, last year, it was all about the health. This year I wanted to learn more about rail. I was really interested in the rail side of things. And so looking at the driver retention and alertness was really interesting. And then there was a presentation on the, why do train drivers pass red signals?

And I think that was done by the rail safety standard board. And. And I was just like why do train drivers pass red signal? Because surely they shouldn't be able to do that. There should be a level of automation in there that says train it's past red, you've gone past a red light, stop the train.

So that was really insightful, in many ways of just how much confusion can happen, but also how much control that they have, which is so that, that was my first, my entire Tuesday morning, two two sessions worth was all about all about the rail and thoroughly enjoyed that.

[00:18:16] Nick Roome: Barry, you didn't answer the question though. Why do they not stop at red lights? It depends.

[00:18:22] Barry Kirby: Okay, see what I did there. Credits. So there was yeah, there was a whole bunch of different reasons. And it was, and I think that was one of the the enlightenment things for me is that there was lots of different reasons, but there was not currently a technological solution in place.

You're still relying on drivers to, to do that now. There Systems in there that can do some of this. But certainly in the UK, they're just not used in the way that, whether they could be, so that was fascinating. So yeah, so most of the Tuesday morning was spent doing that. And therefore I missed some sessions, which I really wanted to go to.

I'm still intrigued by the whole hell thing as we've talked about in the past. So there was elements around that and certain, some of the some of the aviation stuff which I didn't get to touch at all, which is normally a thing I like to go and play with. Then I what else did we go into then?

Oh, we went into look at all sorts of There's a bunch of different things, but it was the AI bit for me that we've talked about before that we get into. So there was some some people here. So Chris Baber, who's from the university of Birmingham, Barry Kerwin from Eurocontrol and, it was being chaired by Professor Paul Salmon, who we, who friend of the channel.

And then Wenqi Lin from Cranfield University. And they had four different elements looking at how are we going to apply AI and things like that. But actually it, this was almost like a real. practical sessions. So we were looking at user interface designs for explainable AI. So just exactly when you have something presented, how much do you want to drill into it?

And how much should it tell you how it got to what it was doing? Then it was around looking at AI challenge in civil aviation, then a bit around using chat GPT for doing some accident analyzing accident investigation, and then The final one by Chris Babe gave two in the same channel, which I think is cheating, but he's done loads of work in this area and he was talking about how people misinterpret answers from the likes of chat GPT.

So from large language models, and one of the bits that was really interesting was he was highlighting how we, whenever you see on LinkedIn or things like that on Tik TOK. There was a trend for asking ChatGPT questions and then laughing at the answers when it gets them wrong, particularly like mathematical questions and things like that.

And he was highlighting that cause people were trying to use the wrong tool for the wrong job because ChatGPT is not a, it's not a calculator. If you want to add up sums, use calculators. It's a statistical model. So it is quite easy to get 2. 2 2 plus two equals five.

Because a lot of people write that as in within text and it could be within the learning material. Therefore, it could actually learn that two, two plus two equals five. So that whole piece around AI was A lot of it was just thoroughly interesting. It was a real practical look, but fundamentally they were getting to almost a conclusion that we've come to quite a few times that human factors coming to the AI domain is late to the table and we need to be doing more about how we apply human factors within the AI domain.

So how do we put what we do onto it, but also how do we then, how do we use it in an effective way? So that. Was, just going to the rail bit and then into this AI bit made the entire conference worth it for me. And I could have gone home at that point quite happily. Clearly I didn't we stayed on and did more.

Wednesday morning stuff so we don't obviously just have the dinner on the night before, so Wednesday morning we're, I think everybody was a little bit delicate which was fine but this is where Kate Preston, who has been on with us before she presented her paper on basically some of her PhD work around sepsis fluid management and using an artificial intelligence tool that, that she'd been reviewing.

And so that was cool. That was interesting. Then we got into some of the best bit for me because there was a defense section. And having said that, I don't go to the stuff that I, Normally that I know about, I had to go to this one cause I was the first person presenting and the, I give a presentation going back to, you said about being in the trenches, my, the title of my presentation was human factors in the trenches.

And it was all about some work we did a couple of years ago where we were actually looking at a a way of. putting trenches, military trenches together and a client had come and asked if we could do some human factor reviews of this innovation that they'd had. And so I delivered this as a bit of a case study.

Now this is the first presentation I've given to conference that there was a proper paper, probably in, in two to three years. And so it was quite nice to be back into that mode. And actually just delivering presentation of the work we'd done and enjoying doing it. And and I thought I thoroughly did enjoy it.

So that, that was good. It meant that I missed one of the other presentations from one of my team as well, which was a shame they scheduled us both at the same time. How rude should really talk to, to, to the people who are

[00:23:12] Nick Roome: organizing the event, Barry.

[00:23:14] Barry Kirby: Yes, there is a bit of that. And also nevermind.

And then to wrap up the, that this sort of Wednesday I stayed, I will, I was going to go in into dip into one of the things, but actually I stayed in the same defense session because We had two presentations from a chap called Sid Shedermeyer from VA Systems. It was all about the future helmet for mounted displays, particularly.

So you think that things like F 35 and things like that and how they work. So they, Talk about latency and field of view and things like that. And Sid has a real style of presenting that's really engaging, really nice. It was a joy to stay and listen to them. And sandwiched in between two of Sid's presentations was a a case study for, there was an accident where an F 35 jet was lost off the Queen Elizabeth carrier.

And Kev Hayes give a presentation on the investigation that happened to work out why this F 35 jet, basically, it got to the end, it'd been in the catapult, it'd come to take off, and just didn't have enough speed. And so right at the last moment, just as the aircraft is on the edge of the deck the pilot ejected and and the plane was lost into the ocean pilot, thankfully was fine, but then the investigation, but why didn't it have enough power to get off and could anything have been done about it?

So just talking through that entire thing, it actually ended up being a a maintenance issue. That had happened, one of the covers for the engines hadn't been taken off, it'd been lost inside the air intake. And nobody realized because of in hindsight, some very simple errors, but actually at the time, nobody realized that it was somebody else's problem to look after.

Thoroughly interesting really insightful and enjoyable sessions. And so yeah, so that, that was basic. That was the content. We had some amazing keynotes. So the, what we call the Donald Broadbent lecture was given by Natasha Merritt from the University of Leeds. And what she was talking about was the interaction between autonomated vehicles and road users.

So when you're crossing the road with, in this, if we're going to have these these vehicles that were autonomous autonomously driven. Can we interact with them so we know that they're going to stop in time for us to cross the road or not? And so work that she'd been doing around that was really interesting.

And then the institute lecture was given by Amanda Whitteson, where she's talking about enhancing cyber security. So how does human factors have a role to play in cyber security? So she'd given us an overview of that work. And then. The other keynote was by Dr. Neil Spenceley from Glasgow Children's Hospital, and he gave a medical perspective from the application of human factors and he.

he was talking about human error quite a lot. And, the Swiss cheese model and has is patient safety, even a real thing, any challenge was quite a lot in terms of thinking. So the way he had a real way of delivering his presentation, that was more of a conversation than it was a formal presentation as such, even though, it was like the way he was really engaging.

And Yeah, it was a really nice presentation to listen to which fundamentally I got out of it. The sort of challenges thing that, we focus so much on what goes wrong. Something went wrong and something happened, but actually 95 percent of the time, 99 percent of the time, things are going right.

So why are we not focusing on the stuff that is going right and making sure we're doing more of that?

[00:26:37] Nick Roome: I can hear

[00:26:37] Barry Kirby: Neil in the comments right now. Hey, go check out this effort. And so that was quite cool. And it was really nice to get somebody who's willing to stand up and say something that the challenges you to think.

I think it's and I don't mean to do anybody a disservice, but I think when you come and do these sorts of big keynotes, you can, it's easy to go and play it safe. You could go and play, play to the audience, tell them something that they want to hear, do that. But if you want to go and actually play it safe.

get people to think you can actually go and do something and challenge the audience, which I think is quite quite neat. I think he, he did some of that. Yeah, so three days of lots of intense networking, lots of intense catching up with people. I think one of the reasons I like this conference is I find other conferences hard work.

I think your social battery disappears very quickly, especially when you've got a room full of people you don't know and things like that. This conference, I find there's lots of friendly faces. It's not a it's not a hard work conference to do. You can go along, you can have a good time. Nobody's going to give you a hard time unless you stand up and give a keynote that, that makes people give you a hard time.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was still thoroughly exhausted by the end of it. So come Wednesday night when I got home, I was ready to sleep for the rest of the week.

[00:27:51] Nick Roome: I'm sure. So taking a look at the 50, 000 foot view, what were some of the most prevalent topics or themes that you saw popping up across sectors across tracks?

What kind of things stood out to you?

[00:28:06] Barry Kirby: So the, really the big thing is still healthcare healthcare in of itself as a complete domain has so much work going on in it by so many fantastic HR practitioners, but there is still something there about them being siloed either by their trust or.

Or whatever the trying to join them together is still a challenge. And there is so much work to do that. It still feels that we, we diving into some really deep stuff. But actually still the basics are not there. We could be doing some really high level stuff. And so I think Talking about, Kate's presentation led into some of this where she initially started about wanting to do AI in in healthcare and get into some really deep power, how we could do that.

But then realizing that actually the application of AI in hospitals, every hospital runs differently. Every healthcare trust runs differently. Some use paper, some use digital, some use a combination of both, some use neither. Some, the, we don't have a standardization across all of that. And it still seems that it seems to be a common theme now for at least three years.

So it's going to be a common theme going forward. AI across the board is a big thing. We talk about it a lot, but the, this idea about not only how do we Advocate for AI, what does it mean to apply human factor standards to the application of artificial intelligence and whatever in its various guises and what does that mean?

But also how do we use it? How do we use it as a tool? How do we use it to make our lives as human factors practitioners easier, better, more effective? There was lots of that sort of discussion. The third one, I think we spoke about human factors integration more than I've seen in a while.

So the actual bringing in, how do we manage human factors within projects? So we saw a bit of that in in rail. We saw a bit of that in in aviation. So that was certainly coming more to the fore than what I've seen in the past. We still, I still think, we don't talk about hf HFI enough about the management of human factors and the way we do it, but that seems to be perhaps changing slightly.

[00:30:18] Nick Roome: Do you have a, do you have a favorite moment at the conference? You can say the whole thing, but is there one that stood out to you? Everything,

[00:30:27] Barry Kirby: yeah.

[00:30:27] Nick Roome: No.

[00:30:27] Barry Kirby: I. I think for me was the, it has to be the award ceremony. And a particular award in particular, I think for me, there was, like I said, there's fantastic people get the awards, but one of them I've Barry Kerwin is somebody who I've.

Weirdly admired from afar for a long time, but never met him before. But read all, read a lot of his work, I've got books of his, read papers of his and all this sort of stuff. And he got a lifetime achievement awards and to be able to present that to him and basically meet, I met him face to face earlier on in, on, on the when he'd stopped me in the corridor said, hi, I'm Barry.

and him introducing himself to me. And I was like, dude, he was like, when you meet your idols type thing. And so then to be able to present him an award that night for it was for his work throughout, throughout his time was just a was just an experience. It was fantastic. So that was definitely a highlight.

And the second one actually for me was being able to present a paper. Being able to just get back to the almost the grind bit of doing the fun bit of saying, Hey, I did some work and I'm really proud of it and I really want to tell you about it was great. I thoroughly enjoyed that.

[00:31:42] Nick Roome: That's awesome.

So I guess the last question I have for you is what are you going to take forward with you? What words are still ringing in your head that you're like, I'm going to apply this to all my work.

[00:31:53] Barry Kirby: So that we go back to the rail stuff. I think the, that's quite interesting. Yeah. For me a lot of that was learning more about a d again, a domain I don't know much about.

And you say about taking it forward. We already are. So we've got meetings coming up in, in a couple of weeks with some of the people who were presenting and and a university who's heavily into it now, and to try and work out where can we share? What we do, because it's not just a case of us going and saying I want to do rail work get fight a real project because unless you've got some reason to be involved, so what am I bringing to the table?

What's my team bringing to the table? Then you've got nowhere to play. But if we can find an opportunity to base it based off what we've done here. To engage with some of that would be brilliant because I thought there was so many different bits of work that were happening, everything from automated signaling and moving signals from from track side to actually inside the cab.

But also then looking at things like how they, how, Drivers are dealt treated and they the conditions that they have to work in looking at things like, we've talked in the past about culture, but then the culture of the railway industry is different again. And there was some work around wearables as well, which obviously I'm quite, I'm very interested in the wearable side of things.

And then the way that the rail industry interacts with other areas, so where we have level crossings there was some work around why do people still ignore railway crossing. Signs, when the barriers come down to say there's a train coming, get off the tracks, people still try to cross.

So that, that was all just absolutely fascinating. So yeah, definitely the rail industry for me, this one, and that there's some really good papers there. And I won't necessarily pick particular ones out, but the wearables one was really good. I think that, that was the biggest takeaway for me about, the learning something new piece.

[00:33:44] Nick Roome: I have to say, Barry, I'm rather cross with you for not inviting me. No, I'm just kidding.

I know it sounds like a great conference. I'm a little bit jealous of the conference. Like you're always jealous of HFES, but hopefully we can remedy that in the future. I think I certainly learned a lot talking to you about your experience and I am very jealous of all the different tracks and experiences that you had there.

And I'm especially jealous. Of the, what was it Monday night entertainment of the yeah, I'm especially jealous of that. I want to do puzzle solving. There's there's some cool some cool things that we can talk about in the post show here, but yeah let's talk about that in the post show for I guess for anyone who's interested in EHF or attending maybe next year, do you have any advice for them?

[00:34:24] Barry Kirby: Yeah, I would, if you, definitely if you can, do the Monday night as well as the Tuesday night, the what I quite like about the conference is that you get an entire package that covers your accommodation all your meals and everything, so it's, everything is nicely wrapped in and therefore, Whilst the actual ticket might seem, feel expensive, it's not because it's got everything in there.

So if you can get in and do the lot, absolutely worthwhile. It's worth doing the Careers Day, even if you're a seasoned professional, because you might chat to some companies who you weren't expecting or that type of thing. So yeah, but also don't be, the biggest thing that I've always said when I stand up and welcome people is don't be afraid to go and say hello to people.

I know it can be intimidating to, see a group of people talking. You don't want to go up and say anything to cause why would they want to speak to you type thing? Or are you putting into some people's conversation? And I feel like I get that. I get, I feel like that all of the time.

But for me, this is the one environment where I do feel comfortable in going up and seeing some random people and say, hi I'm Barry. I do human factors, this stuff. What do you do? And learning from people, the people are open with advice and things like that. It's a good conference to go to just go.

I think it's the, if this year is this year was the biggest one we've had so far. Last, but then last year was the biggest one we've had so far. So we were clearly on a trajectory. Next year I believe it's going to be in the same place again, which the whole hotel seems a really good setup.

Yeah, just go.

[00:35:55] Nick Roome: Just go. All right. I think that'll wrap it up for today. We're going to stick around. If you're sticking stick around, if you're watching live, we're going to do a post show. If you like this and enjoy some of the discussion around conferences, check out some of our past conference coverage.

We've covered everything from HFES. We're now aspired to EHF from last year to the healthcare symposium. Go listen to all that comment, wherever you're listening with what you think of of The topic this week, we're coming back to basics here. So let us know what you think about the conference coverage.

I loved it. For more in depth discussion, you can always join us on all of our social platforms or our discord community. Visit our official website, all that stuff. If you like what you hear, you want to support the show. There's a couple options for you. One, you can stop what you're doing. Leave us a five star review.

We'll take any of those. That helps other people find the show. Two, tell your friends about us. That's how we grow. And three, if you have the financial means to, and you want to support us on Patreon, we have one of those, you can go support us over there. As always links to all of our socials and our website are in the description of this episode.

Barry, thank you for stopping by and telling the folks about EHF 2024. I had to look down to see what year we're in. Where can folks find you if they want to talk to you about railway safety?

[00:37:05] Barry Kirby: So you can find me on social media, pretty much anywhere. Search for Barry Kirby. You'll find me on Twitter or x, then I'm basil.

Just go. Okay. But I'm on the other platforms as well. And if you want to hear more about discussions with other human factors practitioners, then you'll find me on 12 or to the human factors podcast at podcast. com.

[00:37:23] Nick Roome: As for me, I've been your host Nick Rome. You can find me on our discord and across social media at Nick underscore Rome.

Thanks again for tuning into Human Factor's cast. Until next time! It depends.