Ridley is a PhD student in the department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. With CoSSar, she is assisting in the development and deployment of a Seattle Area Virtual Coordination Center (VCC) that will allow transit, emergency management, and other agencies to coordinate their responses to both major incidents and serious congestion.
She is also a member of HCDE’s Computer Supported Collaboration Lab under the direction of professor Charlotte Lee, and brings her interests in Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) to bear in her work with the VCC. Through this project, she seeks not only to ensure that the VCC is effective and leads to better outcomes to keep people and goods moving in Seattle, but also to use it as a laboratory for studying how people use technology to make sense of complex, rapidly changing phenomena and make useful decisions about these phenomena.