Evaluating Trust and Safety in HRI : Practical Issues and Ethical Challenges

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Date of Acceptance: 11/02/2015In an effort to increase the acceptance and persuasiveness of socially assistive robots in home and healthcare environments, HRI researchers attempt to identify factors that promote human trust and perceived safety with regard to robots. Especially in collaborative contexts in which humans are requested to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role, as it is strongly linked to persuasiveness. As a result, human- robot trust can directly affect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance could have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments is not a straightforward task and, in light of a number of ethical concerns and risks, proves quite challenging. This position statement highlights a few of these points based on experiences from HRI practice and raises a few important questions that HRI researchers should consider.Final Accepted Versio

Effective Dynamics of Solitons in the Presence of Rough Nonlinear Perturbations

The effective long-time dynamics of solitary wave solutions of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in the presence of rough nonlinear perturbations is rigorously studied. It is shown that, if the initial state is close to a slowly travelling soliton of the unperturbed NLS equation (in $H^1$ norm), then, over a long time scale, the true solution of the initial value problem will be close to a soliton whose center of mass dynamics is approximately determined by an effective potential that corresponds to the restriction of the nonlinear perturbation to the soliton manifold.Comment: Reference [16] added. 19 page

Cyclic thermodynamic processes and entropy production

We study the time evolution of a periodically driven quantum-mechanical system coupled to several reserviors of free fermions at different temperatures. This is a paradigm of a cyclic thermodynamic process. We introduce the notion of a Floquet Liouvillean as the generator of the dynamics on an extended Hilbert space. We show that the time-periodic state to which the true state of the coupled system converges after very many periods corresponds to a zero-energy resonance of the Floquet Liouvillean. We then show that the entropy production per cycle is (strictly) positive, a property that implies Carnot's formulation of the second law of thermodynamics.Comment: version accepted for publication in J. Stat. Phy

Adiabatic theorems for quantum resonances

We study the adiabatic time evolution of quantum resonances over time scales which are small compared to the lifetime of the resonances. We consider three typical examples of resonances: The first one is that of shape resonances corresponding, for example, to the state of a quantum-mechanical particle in a potential well whose shape changes over time scales small compared to the escape time of the particle from the well. Our approach to studying the adiabatic evolution of shape resonances is based on a precise form of the time-energy uncertainty relation and the usual adiabatic theorem in quantum mechanics. The second example concerns resonances that appear as isolated complex eigenvalues of spectrally deformed Hamiltonians, such as those encountered in the N-body Stark effect. Our approach to study such resonances is based on the Balslev-Combes theory of dilatation-analytic Hamiltonians and an adiabatic theorem for nonnormal generators of time evolution. Our third example concerns resonances arising from eigenvalues embedded in the continuous spectrum when a perturbation is turned on, such as those encountered when a small system is coupled to an infinitely extended, dispersive medium. Our approach to this class of examples is based on an extension of adiabatic theorems without a spectral gap condition. We finally comment on resonance crossings, which can be studied using the last approach.Comment: 35 pages. One remark added in section 3, and references updated. To appear in Commun. Math. Phy

Status of the Fundamental Laws of Thermodynamics

We describe recent progress towards deriving the Fundamental Laws of thermodynamics (the 0th, 1st and 2nd Law) from nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics in simple, yet physically relevant models. Along the way, we clarify some basic thermodynamic notions and discuss various reversible and irreversible thermodynamic processes from the point of view of quantum statistical mechanics.Comment: 23 pages. Some references updated. To appear in J. Stat. Phy

Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots : Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues

Maha Salem, Gabriella Lakatos, Farshid Amirabdollahian, K. Dautenhahn, ‘Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots: Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues’, paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics, Paris, France, 26-30 October, 2015.As robots are increasingly developed to assist humans so- cially with everyday tasks in home and healthcare settings, questions regarding the robot's safety and trustworthiness need to be addressed. The present work investigates the practical and ethical challenges in de- signing and evaluating social robots that aim to be perceived as safe and can win their human users' trust. With particular focus on collaborative scenarios in which humans are required to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role and is strongly linked to persuasiveness. Accordingly, human-robot trust can directly aect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance may have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments proves challenging in light of numerous ethical con- cerns and risks, which this paper aims to highlight and discuss based on experiences from HRI practice.Peer reviewe

Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot? : Effects of Error, Task Type and Personality on Human-Robot Cooperation and Trust

How do mistakes made by a robot affect its trustworthiness and acceptance in human-robot collaboration? We investigate how the perception of erroneous robot behavior may influence human interaction choices and the willingness to cooperate with the robot by following a number of its unusual requests. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a home companion robot in one of two experimental conditions: (1) the correct mode or (2) the faulty mode. Our findings reveal that, while significantly affecting subjective perceptions of the robot and assessments of its reliability and trustworthiness, the robot's performance does not seem to substantially influence participants' decisions to (not) comply with its requests. However, our results further suggest that the nature of the task requested by the robot, e.g. whether its effects are revocable as opposed to irrevocable, has a signicant im- pact on participants' willingness to follow its instructions

Landau and Ott scaling for the kinetic energy density and the low TcT_c conventional superconductors, Li2Pd3BLi_{2}Pd_{3}B and Nb

The scaling approach recently proposed by Landau and Ott for isothermal magnetization curves is extended to the average kinetic energy density of the condensate. Two low $T_c$ superconductors, Nb and $Li_{2}Pd_{3}B$ are studied and their isothermal reversible magnetization shown to display Landau and Ott scaling. Good agreement is obtained for the upper critical field $H_{c2}(T)$, determined from the Abrikosov approximation for the reversible region (standard linear extrapolation of the magnetization curve), and from the maximum of the kinetic energy curves. For the full range of data, which includes the irreversible region, the isothermal $d.M.B/H^2$ curves for $Li_2Pd_3B$ show an impressive collapse into a single curve over the entire range of field measurements. The Nb isothermal $d.M.B/H^2$ curves exhibit the interesting feature of a constant and temperature independent minimum value