20 research outputs found
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Explaining smart heating systems to discourage fiddling with optimized behavior
Our work focuses on textual and graphical explanations for smart heating systems. We have started to investigate the opportunities for when to provide explanations, how we can design these explanations, and we have started to evaluate these explanations. We argue that explanations need to be carefully crafted to fit with their desired aim, in our case to encourage users' trust and reliance while minimizing user interactions
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ExSS 2018: Workshop on explainable smart systems
Smart systems that apply complex reasoning to make decisions and plan behavior are often difficult for users to understand. While research to make systems more explainable and therefore more intelligible and transparent is gaining pace, there are numerous issues and problems regarding these systems that demand further attention. The goal of this workshop is to bring academia and industry together to address these issues. The workshop includes a keynote, poster panels, and group activities, towards developing concrete approaches to handling challenges related to the design, development, and evaluation of explainable smart systems
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Horses for courses: Making the case for persuasive engagement in smart systems
Current thrusts in explainable AI (XAI) have focused on using interpretability or explanatory debugging as frameworks for developing explanations. We argue that for some systems a different paradigm – persuasive engagement – needs to be adopted, in order to affect trust and user satisfaction. In this paper, we will briefly provide an overview of the current approaches to explain smart systems and their scope of application. We then introduce the theoretical basis for persuasive engagement, and show through a use case how explanations might be generated. We then discuss future work that might shed more light on how to best explain different kinds of smart systems
Curative Politics and Institutional Legacies: The Impact of Foreign Assistance on Child Welfare and Healthcare Reform in Romania, 1990-2004, A Cautionary Tale
Western democracies, especially the United States, increasingly utilize foreign assistance to influence the policies of developing nations ("curative politics") despite extensive literature that this assistance is often ineffective. Cross-national data on the impact of bilateral and multilateral aid are cautionary, but these studies put the interaction between donors and recipient governments in a black box, obscuring empirical dynamics that condition success--or failure--in reform outcomes.
Using a "controlled comparison" of two cases in which international donors have tried to steer reform in Romania between 1990 and 2004, this paper asks: How does foreign assistance influence the process of indigenous reform? By selecting two cases (child welfare and healthcare reform) in the same country, during the same period, macro-economic and political factors can be controlled, allowing an analysis that highlights critical differences in domestic interests, institutions, and international engagement.
The dissertation concludes that foreign assistance is beneficial when credible international commitments spur difficult, complex change. However, the rational tendency of organized interests to undermine reform--especially if the extraction of rents is allowed by partial reform--is a strong countervailing current. Foreign assistance, too often fixated on teleological end-states and normative goals, is inefficient when: 1) Reform recommendations rely on national legislation, with little attention to intra-governmental bargaining, especially regarding budgets; 2) Reform plans fail to anticipate short-term "winners" and ignore financial incentives to subvert reform; and 3) Donors exaggerate the break between past and present, missing opportunities to better understand contemporary constraints as a function of historical legacies.
Although the ideology of state socialism was defeated in Romania in 1989, post-communist reform left bureaucratic coordination in place, especially in the provision of public services. With norms such as the reliance on soft-budget constraints maintained, and without competition or independent monitoring to enforce accountability, outside attempts to help reorganize health services failed. Performance-based conditionality tied to credible international threats led child welfare reform beyond stalemate, although deep change in the form of employment cuts or financial decentralization was resisted