Meaningful Human Control over Smart Home Systems: A Value Sensitive Design Approach

The last decade has witnessed the mass distribution and adoption of smart home systems and devices powered by artificial intelligence systems ranging from household appliances like fridges and toasters to more background systems such as air and water quality controllers. The pervasiveness of these sociotechnical systems makes analyzing their ethical implications necessary during the design phases of these devices to ensure not only sociotechnical resilience, but to design them for human values in mind and thus preserve meaningful human control over them. This paper engages in a conceptual investigations of how meaningful human control over smart home devices can be attained through design. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach is proposed as a way of attaining this level of control. In the proposed framework, values are identified and defined, stakeholder groups are investigated and brought into the design process and the technical constraints of the technologies in question are considered. The paper concludes with some initial examples that illustrate a more adoptable way forward for both ethicists and engineers of smart home devices

An agent-based approach to assess drivers’ interaction with pre-trip information systems.

This article reports on the practical use of a multi-agent microsimulation framework to address the issue of assessing drivers’ responses to pretrip information systems. The population of drivers is represented as a community of autonomous agents, and travel demand results from the decision-making deliberation performed by each individual of the population as regards route and departure time. A simple simulation scenario was devised, where pretrip information was made available to users on an individual basis so that its effects at the aggregate level could be observed. The simulation results show that the overall performance of the system is very likely affected by exogenous information, and these results are ascribed to demand formation and network topology. The expressiveness offered by cognitive approaches based on predicate logics, such as the one used in this research, appears to be a promising approximation to fostering more complex behavior modelling, allowing us to represent many of the mental aspects involved in the deliberation process

Movement-based Group Awareness with Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a method through which dynamic sensor nodes determine that they move together, by communicating and correlating their movement information. We describe two possible solutions, one using inexpensive tilt switches, and another one using low-cost MEMS accelerometers. We implement a fast, incremental correlation algorithm, with an execution time of 6ms, which can run on resource constrained devices. The tests with the implementation on real sensor nodes show that the method is reliable and distinguishes between joint and separate movements. In addition, we analyze the scalability from four different perspectives: communication, energy, memory and execution speed. The solution using tilt switches proves to be simpler, cheaper and more energy efficient, while the accelerometer-based solution is more reliable, more robust to sensor alignment problems and, potentially, more accurate by using extended features, such as speed and distance

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory