Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems

The use of dialogue systems as a medium for human-machine interaction is an increasingly prevalent paradigm. A growing number of dialogue systems use conversation strategies that are learned from large datasets. There are well documented instances where interactions with these system have resulted in biased or even offensive conversations due to the data-driven training process. Here, we highlight potential ethical issues that arise in dialogue systems research, including: implicit biases in data-driven systems, the rise of adversarial examples, potential sources of privacy violations, safety concerns, special considerations for reinforcement learning systems, and reproducibility concerns. We also suggest areas stemming from these issues that deserve further investigation. Through this initial survey, we hope to spur research leading to robust, safe, and ethically sound dialogue systems.Comment: In Submission to the AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Societ

Adaptive Cognitive Interaction Systems

Adaptive kognitive Interaktionssysteme beobachten und modellieren den Zustand ihres Benutzers und passen das Systemverhalten entsprechend an. Ein solches System besteht aus drei Komponenten: Dem empirischen kognitiven Modell, dem komputationalen kognitiven Modell und dem adaptiven Interaktionsmanager. Die vorliegende Arbeit enthält zahlreiche Beiträge zur Entwicklung dieser Komponenten sowie zu deren Kombination. Die Ergebnisse werden in zahlreichen Benutzerstudien validiert

Strategies based on the natural approach to reinforce the english-speaking skill in sophomores

To adapt strategies based on the Natural Approach to reinforce the English-speaking skill in sophomores within the academic year 2020-2021.El presente trabajo de investigación se basa en la adaptación de estrategias de Enfoque Natural para reforzar la habilidad del habla en el ámbito educativo. A lo largo de los años, la lengua inglesa se ha visto muy afectada por metodologías tradicionalistas que se han aplicado erróneamente, es por ello que el objetivo principal de este estudio se centra en el uso de las habilidades orales para lograr que los alumnos del Primer Bachillerato de la Unidad Educativa La "Academia General Machado" alcanza el nivel A2, nivel previamente establecido dentro del Ministerio de Educación. Para lograr los objetivos de este estudio se utilizó una metodología mixta que permitió la recolección de datos cualitativos, a través de una entrevista, y cuantitativos, una prueba oral, lo que permitió tener una idea clara de las deficiencias que tenían los estudiantes en cuanto a la habilidad oral. Uno de los resultados más reveladores de este estudio fue cómo los niveles de ansiedad afectaron negativamente la participación de los estudiantes, quienes a pesar de reconocer el papel de la lengua inglesa en nuestro entorno, también reconocen el miedo a cometer errores, por ello, la guía metodológica que se propuso dentro de este estudio fue diseñado siguiendo los lineamientos del Enfoque Natural para crear clases innovadoras donde también se tienen en cuenta los intereses y gustos de los estudiantes para crear un ambiente de participación y aprendizaje.Maestrí

Representing the refugee: Rhetoric, discourse and the public agenda

The central concern of this dissertation is to examine representation and selfrepresentation as they pertain to this nation’s response to asylum seekers between the Tampa affair in August 2001 and the defeat of the Coalition government in the 2007 federal election. The first half of the dissertation examines the representation of refugees in two of the nation’s prominent newspapers, The West Australian and The Australian. Drawing upon the work of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Michel Foucault and others it is contended that in the Australian government and media’s representation of asylum seekers Manichean-based ideologies can be traced, which serve to propagate the Orientalist’s project. Furthermore, a close analysis of From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in Australia’s Detention Centres and Asylum: Voices behind the razor wire, shows that it is only through selfrepresentation that the damaging effects of Orientalism can be challenged. As such the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin are central to this analysis of refugees’ selfrepresentations. In the final chapter the work of Emmanuel Levinas is also used, of particular interest is his concept of ‘face’. Combined with some of the ideas of the aforementioned theorists this demonstrates the centrality of oral discourse and selfrepresentation as sites of life, death and most crucially, hope for those refugees seeking to be accepted into the Australian community. The analysis of The West Australian and The Australian conducted in the first two chapters of this dissertation should be read in this context. While there are many factors that contribute to newspaper production such as audience, editorial influences and advertising demands to name but a few, these are not treated by this dissertation. My approach is entirely focussed on the politics of language in terms of its conception, use and effect. Similarly, in my analysis of refugees’ selfrepresentations, conducted in the final two chapters of the dissertation, these same concerns are fore-grounded. Furthermore, as the representations and selfrepresentations surrounding refugees considered in this dissertation were produced within specific historical and social conditions these also play an important role in informing my analysis. This Masters by Research (English Literature) was written by John Martin Cartner for the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Notre Dame (Fremantle) and submitted in the year 2009

Explainable and Advisable Learning for Self-driving Vehicles

Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance companies, law enforcement, developers, etc., can understand what triggered a particular behavior. Explanations may be triggered by the neural controller, namely introspective explanations, or informed by the neural controller's output, namely rationalizations. Our work has focused on the challenge of generating introspective explanations of deep models for self-driving vehicles. In Chapter 3, we begin by exploring the use of visual explanations. These explanations take the form of real-time highlighted regions of an image that causally influence the network's output (steering control). In the first stage, we use a visual attention model to train a convolution network end-to-end from images to steering angle. The attention model highlights image regions that potentially influence the network's output. Some of these are true influences, but some are spurious. We then apply a causal filtering step to determine which input regions actually influence the output. This produces more succinct visual explanations and more accurately exposes the network's behavior. In Chapter 4, we add an attention-based video-to-text model to produce textual explanations of model actions, e.g. "the car slows down because the road is wet". The attention maps of controller and explanation model are aligned so that explanations are grounded in the parts of the scene that mattered to the controller. We explore two approaches to attention alignment, strong- and weak-alignment. These explainable systems represent an externalization of tacit knowledge. The network's opaque reasoning is simplified to a situation-specific dependence on a visible object in the image. This makes them brittle and potentially unsafe in situations that do not match training data. In Chapter 5, we propose to address this issue by augmenting training data with natural language advice from a human. Advice includes guidance about what to do and where to attend. We present the first step toward advice-giving, where we train an end-to-end vehicle controller that accepts advice. The controller adapts the way it attends to the scene (visual attention) and the control (steering and speed). Further, in Chapter 6, we propose a new approach that learns vehicle control with the help of long-term (global) human advice. Specifically, our system learns to summarize its visual observations in natural language, predict an appropriate action response (e.g. "I see a pedestrian crossing, so I stop"), and predict the controls, accordingly

Developing language skills in second language learners through literature discussions

This study analyzed book discussions of primary aged ESL students and their teacher to examine the benefits to language development. Collected over one school year, data included transcribed audiotapes of the book discussions, class interviews, and personal journal entries of the teacher which described classroom events and interactions. Analysis of the transcripts resulted in the identification of seven categories which illustrated the diversity of types of talk. In addition, changes in the amount of student and teacher talk over time were noted, with student talk increasing, and teacher talk becoming less pronounced. Four students were highlighted to illustrate the benefits of picture book discussions for different English proficiency levels. Finally, the role of the teacher in these discussions was explored. Several benefits of discussing picture books with ESL students are suggested in terms of their importance for language development

Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction