In the user's eyes we find trust: Using gaze data as a predictor or trust in an artifical intelligence

Trust is essential for our interactions with others but also with artificial intelligence (AI) based systems. To understand whether a user trusts an AI, researchers need reliable measurement tools. However, currently discussed markers mostly rely on expensive and invasive sensors, like electroencephalograms, which may cause discomfort. The analysis of gaze data has been suggested as a convenient tool for trust assessment. However, the relationship between trust and several aspects of the gaze behaviour is not yet fully understood. To provide more insights into this relationship, we propose a exploration study in virtual reality where participants have to perform a sorting task together with a simulated AI in a simulated robotic arm embedded in a gaming. We discuss the potential benefits of this approach and outline our study design in this submission.Comment: Workshop submission of a proposed research project at TRAIT 2023 (held at CHI2023 in Hamburg

Socially Anxious Play: Design, Development, and Evaluation of Game-Based Digital Behavioural Markers for the Assessment of Social Anxiety

Social relationships are essential for humans; neglecting our social needs can cause discomfort or even lead to the development of more severe issues such as loneliness, depression, or substance dependency. Although essential, some individuals face major challenges in forming and maintaining social relationships due to the experience of social anxiety, which is the intense fear of being evaluated by others. The burden of social anxiety can be reduced through accessible assessment that leads to treatment. However, socially anxious individuals who wish to seek help face many barriers stemming from geography, the characteristics of the fear itself, or disparities in access to systems of care. Recent research has suggested digital behavioural markers as a way to deliver cheap and easily accessible digital assessment for social anxiety that may help reduce barriers to care. However, prior work focused mostly on the relationship between social anxiety and the development of problematic gaming behaviours to cope with the potentially severe consequences of social anxiety. In this dissertation, we look at the relationship between social anxiety and digital games from the lens of assessment and analyze whether we can use digital behavioural markers embedded in a gaming task to assess the severity of social anxiety. In manuscript 1, we show that social anxiety may manifest in game and biases the preferences for in-game activities and the reasons why players play Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). Further, Manuscript 2 shows that central game mechanics, such as the customization of the self-representation in-game, may affect the experience of social stress in-game. Manuscripts 3 and 4 explore the in-game movement of a player around a non-player character (NPC) and show that certain aspects of the movement path may be used to predict the degree of social anxiety. Further, we show that the camera perspective as well as the self-representation may affect the strength of these behavioural markers of social anxiety. Finally, Manuscript 5 explores how the found behavioral markers, as well as the developed gaming task, may be used to predict self-reported psychopathy---which is negatively related to social anxiety---and further shows that personal character traits manifest in-game and may explain certain phenomena such as the presence of anti-social behaviour in digital games. Overall, the results of this dissertation provide new insights about the relationship between social anxiety and its manifestation in-game, the influence of game mechanics on the experience of social stress, and how social anxiety as well as psychopathic traits may affect in-game behaviours, opening the way towards digital behavioural markers for the assessment of social anxiety

Virtuelle Rekonstruktion des Regensburger Ballhauses

A single abstract from the DHd-2015 Book of Abstracts.Sofern eine editorische Arbeit an dieser Publikation stattgefunden hat, dann bestand diese aus der Eliminierung von Bindestrichen in Überschriften, die aufgrund fehlerhafter Silbentrennung entstanden sind, der Vereinheitlichung von Namen der Autor*innen in das Schema "Nachname, Vorname" und/oder der Trennung von Überschrift und Unterüberschrift durch die Setzung eines Punktes, sofern notwendig

How Avatar Customization Affects Fear in a Game-based Digital Exposure Task for Social Anxiety

The treatment of social anxiety through digital exposure therapy is challenging due to the cognitive properties of social anxiety-individuals need to be fully engaged in the task and feel themselves represented in the social situation; however, avatar customization has been shown to increase both engagement and social presence. In this paper, we harness techniques used in commercial games, and investigate how customizing self-representation in a novel digital exposure task for social anxiety influences the experience of social threat. In an online experiment with 200 participants, participants either customized their avatar or were assigned a predefined avatar. Participants then controlled the avatar through a virtual shop, where they had to solve a math problem, while a simulated audience within the virtual world observed them and negatively judged their performance. Our findings show that we can stimulate the fear of evaluation by others in our task, that fear is driven primarily by trait social anxiety, and that this relationship is strengthened for people higher in trait social anxiety. We provide new insights into the effects of customization in a novel therapeutic context, and embed the discussion of avatar customization into related work in social anxiety and human-computer interaction

(Don’t) stand by me: How trait psychopathy and NPC emotion influence player perceptions, verbal responses, and movement behaviours in a gaming task

Social interactions are an essential part of many digital games, and provide benefts to players; however, problematic social interactions also lead to harm. To inform our understanding of the origins of harmful social behaviours in gaming contexts, we examine how trait psychopathy infuences player perceptions and behaviours within a gaming task. After measuring participants’ (n=385) traitlevel boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, we expose them to neutral and angry social interactions with a non-player character (NPC) in a gaming task and assess their perceptions, verbal responses, and movement behaviours. Our fndings demonstrate that the traits signifcantly infuence interpretation of NPC emotion, verbal responses to the NPC, and movement behaviours around the NPC. These insights can inform the design of social games and communities and can help designers and researchers better understand how social functioning translates into gaming contexts

The Potential of Game Streaming as Exposure Therapy for Social Anxiety

NSERC, SWaGURPeer ReviewedSocial anxiety is a prevalent problem that affects many people with varying severity; digital exposure therapy—which involves controlled exposure to simulations of feared social situations alongside cognitive restructuring—can help treat patients with anxieties. However, the need to personalize exposure scenarios and simulate audiences are barriers to treating social anxieties through digital exposure. In this paper, we propose game streaming as an exposure therapy paradigm for social anxiety, supporting it with data from two studies. We first propose a framework describing requirements for exposure therapy and how game streaming can fulfill them. We select demand and performance visibility from these characteristics to showcase how to manipulate them for experiences of gradual exposure. With Study 1, we provide evidence for these characteristics and support for the framework by showing that a game’s demand affected expected fear of streaming games. In Study 2, we show that the prospect of streaming led to elevated fear, a necessary property for effective exposure therapy. Further, we show that the effect of streaming on expected fear was similar for participants who can be considered socially anxious. These findings provide evidence for the essential effect of exposure therapy, which serves as a first step towards the validation of streaming as a social anxiety treatment. Our paper provides an initial, important step towards a novel, broadly applicable, and widely accessible digital approach for the treatment of social anxiety

Assessing the relationship between subjective trust, confidence measurements, and mouse trajectory characteristics in an online task

Trust is essential for our interactions with others but also with artificial intelligence (AI) based systems. To understand whether a user trusts an AI, researchers need reliable measurement tools. However, currently discussed markers mostly rely on expensive and invasive sensors, like electroencephalograms, which may cause discomfort. The analysis of mouse trajectory has been suggested as a convenient tool for trust assessment. However, the relationship between trust, confidence and mouse trajectory is not yet fully understood. To provide more insights into this relationship, we asked participants (n = 146) to rate whether several tweets were offensive while an AI suggested its assessment. Our results reveal which aspects of the mouse trajectory are affected by the users subjective trust and confidence ratings; yet they indicate that these measures might not explain sufficiently the variance to be used on their own. This work examines a potential low-cost trust assessment in AI systems.Comment: Submitted to CHI 2023 and rejecte

Acute Reversible Heart Failure Caused by Coronary Vasoconstriction due to Continuous 5-Fluorouracil Combination Chemotherapy

We present the case of a 51-year-old male patient who received adjuvant chemotherapy consisting of oxaliplatin, bolus and continuous 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and leucovorin after anterior resection because of locally advanced rectal cancer. Preoperative chemotherapy with capecitabine (an oral 5-FU prodrug) had been well tolerated. Two days after initiation of the first course of chemotherapy, the patient reported typical chest pain. The ECG showed ST elevations and prominent T waves in almost all leads. Due to suspicion of a high-risk acute coronary syndrome, an urgent cardiac catheterization was performed. It showed a generally reduced coronary flow with multiple significant stenoses (including the ostia of the left and right coronary artery), as well as a highly reduced left ventricular function with diffuse hypokinesia. Due to the meanwhile completely stable situation of the patient after medical acute coronary syndrome treatment, no ad hoc intervention was performed to allow further discussion of the optimal management. Thereafter, the patient remained clinically asymptomatic, without any rise in cardiac necrosis parameters; only NT-pro-BNP was significantly elevated. A control cardiac catheterization 2 days later revealed a restored normal coronary artery flow with only coronary calcifications without significant stenoses, as well as a normal left ventricular ejection fraction. Cardiovascular symptoms occurred on the second day of continuous 5-FU treatment. As cardiotoxic effects seem to appear more frequently under continuous application of 5-FU, compared to the earlier established 5-FU bolus regimens, treating medical oncologists should pay special attention to occurring cardiac symptoms and immediately interrupt 5-FU chemotherapy and start a cardiologic work-up

Cytokinesis and the contractile ring in fission yeast: towards a systems-level understanding

Cytokinesis, the final stage of the cell division cycle, requires the proper placement, assembly and contraction of an actomyosin-based contractile ring. Conserved sets of cytokinesis proteins and pathways have now been identified and characterized functionally. Additionally, fluorescent protein fusion technology enables quantitative high-resolution imaging of protein dynamics in living cells. For these reasons, the study of cytokinesis is now ripe for quantitative, systems-level approaches. Here, we review our current understanding of the molecular mechanisms of contractile ring dynamics in the model organism Schizosaccharomyces pombe (fission yeast), focusing on recent examples that illustrate a synergistic integration of quantitative experimental data with computational modeling. A picture of a highly dynamic and integrated system consisting of overlapping networks is beginning to emerge, the detailed nature of which remains to be elucidated.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH grant GM05683)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professorship)Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Faculty startup funds

Novel human antibody therapeutics: The age of the Umabs

Monoclonal antibodies represent a major and increasingly important category of biotechnology products for the treatment of human diseases. The state-of-the-art of antibody technology has evolved to the point where therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, that are practically indistinguishable from antibodies induced in humans, are routinely generated. We depict how our science-based approach can be used to further improve the efficacy of antibody therapeutics, illustrated by the development of three monoclonal antibodies for various cancer indications: zanolimumab (directed against CD4), ofatumumab (directed against CD20) and zalutumumab (directed against epidermal growth factor receptor)