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Jack Li
Jack Li is a human-computer interaction designer at NASA Ames Research Center working on planning and scheduling tools.
Jack Li grew up and went to elementary, middle and high school in Los Angeles, CA. He went to UC Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science because of his interest in computers and technology. During his undergraduate studies, he became more interested in the problems people encountered when using computers and wanted to learn how to go about designing technology that would make people's lives easier. Thus, he went to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to get his Master of Human-Computer Interaction degree. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) consists of many disciplines including computer science, design, and psychology to understand how people think and feel when they are using computers so that computers may be better designed to be more easy and fun to use.At NASA, Jack works to improve planning and scheduling tools for a wide variety of projects including the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), and International Space Station operations and power planning.
On NEEMO, Jack's role is the planner whose job is to create and maintain the schedule that the crew must follow every day in order to complete their mission objectives. The schedule is the backbone of the mission and everybody involved, including scientists, support divers, managers as well as the crew of aquanauts, depends on a schedule so that the crew can carry out its goals successfully. There are over 50 different kinds of activities the crew must perform on NEEMO 14. Jack is using a computer software tool called SPIFe (read as "spiffy" which stands for the Scheduling and Planning Interface For Exploration) to maintain the crew's schedule.