Digital Technology Disorder: Justification and a proposed model of treatment

Due to advances in technology being made at an exponential rate, organisations are attempting to compete with one another by utilising state-of-the-art technology to provide innovative products and services that encourage use. However, there is no moral code to inform sensitive technology design, a consequence of which is the emergence of so-called technology addiction. While addiction as a term is problematic, increasing evidence suggests that related-conditions present implications for the individual, for organisations and for wider society. In this research, a consideration of the potentially addictive elements of technology indicates that it can be possible to reverse engineer these systems, as it were, to promote the development of new behaviours, which can enable the individual to abstain from overuse. Utilising smartphones to deliver digital behavioural change interventions can leverage abundant data touchpoints to provide highly tailored treatment, in addition to allowing for enhanced monitoring and accuracy. To inform understanding of this contemporary phenomenon, the literature on addiction has been reviewed, along with the literature on persuasion architecture to inform an understanding of techniques that lend themselves to overuse and how these can be leveraged to promote recovery. From which, the authors have developed a proposed model to inform the practice of those operating in the domains of computer science

Strategic Argumentation Dialogues for Persuasion: Framework and Experiments Based on Modelling the Beliefs and Concerns of the Persuadee

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is good in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants showing that our automated persuasion system based on this technology is superior to a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy.Comment: The Data Appendix containing the arguments, argument graphs, assignment of concerns to arguments, preferences over concerns, and assignment of beliefs to arguments, is available at the link http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.hunter/papers/unistudydata.zip The code is available at https://github.com/ComputationalPersuasion/MCC