Safety first

It’s a sign. Red means stop. Green means go. But there are many more signs and symbols that keep us safe, wherever we go. Adam Piper, doctoral student in industrial and systems engineering, and his adviser, faculty member Jerry Davis, are working to improve protection and health in the workplace with better, simpler safety symbols. They’re using freehand drawings plus artificially intelligent software to design symbols that can be used on machinery labels or placed on signs around the manufacturing floor. By recruiting dozens of diverse research participants, they start with a volunteer’s own version of three safety symbols they’ve been instructed to draw by hand. Then, Piper and Davis teach an artificially intelligent system to produce additional, more universally recognized symbol designs that users might better understand at first glance.

Piper and Davis recently received a $12,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (CDC/NIOSH) through the Deep South Center for Occupational Safety and Health’s Pilot Project Research and Training program. Symbols such as “Warning: Hot Exhaust,” “Risk of Falling” and “Do Not Touch with Wet Hands” may not be as common as “Exit,” but they might just save someone’s life.