The potential of physical motion cues: changing people’s perception of robots’ performance

Autonomous robotic systems can automatically perform actions on behalf of users in the domestic environment to help people in their daily activities. Such systems aim to reduce users' cognitive and physical workload, and improve wellbeing. While the benefits of these systems are clear, recent studies suggest that users may misconstrue their performance of tasks. We see an opportunity in designing interaction techniques that improve how users perceive the performance of such systems. We report two lab studies (N=16 each) designed to investigate whether showing physical motion, which is showing the process of a system through movement (that is intrinsic to the system's task), of an autonomous system as it completes its task, affects how users perceive its performance. To ensure our studies are ecologically valid and to motivate participants to provide thoughtful responses we adopted consensus-oriented financial incentives. Our results suggest that physical presence does yield higher performance ratings.<br/

Learning from the veg box: designing unpredictability in agency delegation

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two- week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people’s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices

Visions, Values, and Videos: Revisiting Envisionings in Service of UbiComp Design for the Home

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by "calm" and the other by "engaging" visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.Comment: DIS'20, July 6-10, 2020, Eindhoven, Netherland

Helping users adopt and delegate agency to autonomous agents in everyday life

Autonomous agents are designed to take actions on behalf of users, acting autonomously upon data from sensors or online sources. However, the performance and actions of such agents are liable to uncertainties. As such, the design of interaction mechanisms that enable users to understand the operation of autonomous agents and flexibly delegate or regain control is an open challenge for HCI. Against this background, in this thesis we report on three studies designed to better understand how to help users interact with autonomous agents. In particular, we begin by understanding how people deal with uncertainties when delegating agency to autonomous services. We then examined the impact of different agent-designs and feedback mechanisms, inspired by the factors that encourages people to delegate agency in an everyday setting. Based on our findings, we discuss key implications for the design of future autonomous technologies and the design of interaction mechanisms to help users make the best use of such systems

The effect of displaying system confidence information on the usage of autonomous systems for non-specialist applications: a lab study

Autonomous systems are designed to take actions on behalf of users, acting autonomously upon data from sensors or online sources. As such, the design of interaction mechanisms that enable users to understand the operation of autonomous systems and flexibly delegate or regain control is an open challenge for HCI. Against this background, in this paper we report on a lab study designed to investigate whether displaying the confidence of an autonomous system about the quality of its work, which we call its confidence information, can improve user acceptance and interaction with autonomous systems. The results demonstrate that confidence information encourages the usage of the autonomous system we tested, compared to a situation where such information is not available. Furthermore, an additional contribution of our work is the methodology we employ to study users' incentives to do work in collaboration with the autonomous system. In experiments comparing different incentive strategies, our results indicate that our translation of behavioural economics research methods to HCI can support the study of interactions with autonomous systems in the lab

Dataset for &quot;The Effect of Displaying System Confidence Information on the Usage of Autonomous Systems for Non-specialist Applications: A Lab Study&quot;

Dataset for &quot;The Effect of Displaying System Confidence Information on the Usage of Autonomous Systems for Non-specialist Applications: A Lab Study&quot;</span

Green ICT - (JT)2L

A set of lecture slides and accompanying text tutorial

Seeing (movement) is believing: the effect of motion on perception of automatic systems performance

In this article, we report on one lab study and seven follow-up studies on a crowdsourcing platform designed to investigate the potential of animation cues to influence users’ perception of two smart systems: a handwriting recognition and a part-of-speech tagging system. Results from the first three studies indicate that animation cues can influence a participant’s perception of both systems’ performance. The subsequent three studies, designed to try and identify an explanation for this effect, suggest that this effect is related to the participants’ mental model of the smart system. The last two studies were designed to characterize the effect more in detail, and they revealed that different amounts of animation do not seem to create substantial differences and that the effect persists even when the system’s performance decreases, but only when the difference in performance level between the systems being compared is small.</p

Dataset for Seeing (Movement) is Believing: The Effect of Motion on Perception of Automatic Systems Performance

Dataset supports: Garc&iacute;a Garc&iacute;a, Pedro et al (2018) Seeing (Movement) is Believing: The Effect of Motion on Perception of Automatic Systems Performance, Human&ndash;Computer Interaction.</span

Learning from the veg box: designing unpredictability in agency delegation

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two- week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people’s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices