Regulating Highly Automated Robot Ecologies: Insights from Three User Studies

Highly automated robot ecologies (HARE), or societies of independent autonomous robots or agents, are rapidly becoming an important part of much of the world's critical infrastructure. As with human societies, regulation, wherein a governing body designs rules and processes for the society, plays an important role in ensuring that HARE meet societal objectives. However, to date, a careful study of interactions between a regulator and HARE is lacking. In this paper, we report on three user studies which give insights into how to design systems that allow people, acting as the regulatory authority, to effectively interact with HARE. As in the study of political systems in which governments regulate human societies, our studies analyze how interactions between HARE and regulators are impacted by regulatory power and individual (robot or agent) autonomy. Our results show that regulator power, decision support, and adaptive autonomy can each diminish the social welfare of HARE, and hint at how these seemingly desirable mechanisms can be designed so that they become part of successful HARE.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to appear in the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction (HAI-2017), Bielefeld, German

The Grizzly, October 10, 2013

Annual Ursinus College Crime Report Released • Homecoming 2013 Preview • Religious Faith on Campus • Student Affairs\u27 New Mission Statement • Student Retention • Ursinus\u27 Grizzly Gala Returns • CSCG Features Speaker • Opinion: Ursinus Curates its Web Presence Poorly; We All Need the Stress Management Course • Carty Balances Football and Pre-Law • Golf Prepares for Spring During Fall Season • Football Sits at 5-0, Men\u27s Soccer Takes a Losshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1889/thumbnail.jp

The Grizzly, November 7, 2013

Poet Brian Teare Invited to Ursinus • The Street Piano Program Expanded to Collegeville • Tour Guides Serve as Ambassadors of the Ursinus Student Body • Campus Sculptures Donated Over Time • Counselor Sets Goals • Foreign Film Screenings at Ursinus • Students Speak About Kemper • Opinion: UC-Themed Anonymous Accounts are Hurtful; Courtyard Pilot Program\u27s Work Not Yet Complete • Ursinus Men\u27s Basketball Preview • Moliken Headed for Coaches Hall of Fame • Fall Sports Come to a Closehttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1892/thumbnail.jp

The Grizzly, November 21, 2013

UCARE Service Opportunities • Wismer\u27s Upcoming Holiday Meals • Wonderful Town Musical to Integrate Three Departments • Jingle Jog 5K Race • Gospel Choir Wants to Extend Reach • Integrating Students : New Professor Looks to Meld Research and Hands-On Learning • Improv Group Ready to Wing It • Opinion: Break Out of Your Stifling Clique; Increase Support for the Learning Disabled • Field Hockey Finishes Impressive Season • UC Swimming Making Mark in Centennial • Mixture of Wins and Losses for UC Teamshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1894/thumbnail.jp

The Grizzly, September 12, 2013

Reimert Arrest • USGA Leadership Retreat • Construction in Thomas and Pfahler • Ursinus Site Undergoes Update • 14th Annual Fringe Festival • New Pitch Program Rewards Creativity • Policy Changes a Result of Student Demand • Opinion: Chemical Attacks Need International Response; We Should Stay Out of Syria • UC\u27s Open Laptops • Volleyball Counting on Newcomers This Season • Athletic Training Room Source of Aid and Knowledge • Men\u27s Soccer Looking to Improve • More Shots a Priority for Bearshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1885/thumbnail.jp

Accounting for Graded Performance within a Discrete Search Framework

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98271/1/s15516709cog2004_2.pd

The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins

https://via.library.depaul.edu/museum-publications/1010/thumbnail.jp

Climate dynamics and fluid mechanics: Natural variability and related uncertainties

The purpose of this review-and-research paper is twofold: (i) to review the role played in climate dynamics by fluid-dynamical models; and (ii) to contribute to the understanding and reduction of the uncertainties in future climate-change projections. To illustrate the first point, we focus on the large-scale, wind-driven flow of the mid-latitude oceans which contribute in a crucial way to Earth's climate, and to changes therein. We study the low-frequency variability (LFV) of the wind-driven, double-gyre circulation in mid-latitude ocean basins, via the bifurcation sequence that leads from steady states through periodic solutions and on to the chaotic, irregular flows documented in the observations. This sequence involves local, pitchfork and Hopf bifurcations, as well as global, homoclinic ones. The natural climate variability induced by the LFV of the ocean circulation is but one of the causes of uncertainties in climate projections. Another major cause of such uncertainties could reside in the structural instability in the topological sense, of the equations governing climate dynamics, including but not restricted to those of atmospheric and ocean dynamics. We propose a novel approach to understand, and possibly reduce, these uncertainties, based on the concepts and methods of random dynamical systems theory. As a very first step, we study the effect of noise on the topological classes of the Arnol'd family of circle maps, a paradigmatic model of frequency locking as occurring in the nonlinear interactions between the El Nino-Southern Oscillations (ENSO) and the seasonal cycle. It is shown that the maps' fine-grained resonant landscape is smoothed by the noise, thus permitting their coarse-grained classification. This result is consistent with stabilizing effects of stochastic parametrization obtained in modeling of ENSO phenomenon via some general circulation models.Comment: Invited survey paper for Special Issue on The Euler Equations: 250 Years On, in Physica D: Nonlinear phenomen