How to build an echoborg: PhD researcher Kevin Corti featured on the BBC

Research by Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespie on “echoborgs”, a hybrid social agent consisting of a real person who speaks words determined by a computer program, has been featured on the BBC website. By Brett Heasman and Kevin Cort

Revisiting Milgram’s cyranoid method: experimenting with hybrid human agents

In two studies based on Stanley Milgram’s original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequently interact with third parties face-to-face. We show that naïve interlocutors perceive a cyranoid to be a unified, autonomously communicating person, evidence for a phenomenon Milgram termed the “cyranic illusion.” We also show that creating cyranoids composed of contrasting identities (a child speaking adult-generated words and vice versa) can be used to study how stereotyping and person perception are mediated by inner (dispositional) vs. outer (physical) identity. Our results establish the cyranoid method as a unique means of obtaining experimental control over inner and outer identities within social interactions rich in mundane realism

Developing the cyranoid method of mediated interpersonal communication in a social psychological context: applications in person perception, human-computer interaction, and first-person research

This thesis revisits Stanley Milgram’s “cyranoid method” of interactive social psychological experimentation (Milgram, 2010a) and explores the technique’s empirical potential in several domains. The central component of the method is speech shadowing, a procedure that involves a person (the shadower) repeating in real-time words they receive through an innerear monitor by-way-of radio-relay from a remote source. Speech shadowing effectively creates a hybrid agent (a “cyranoid”) composed of the body of one individual (the shadower) and the “mind” (or more precisely, the words) of another (the source). Interactants naïve to this manipulation perceive speech shadowers as autonomous communicators, and this perceptual bias (the “cyranic illusion”) affords researchers the ability to inspect the effects of separately altering the physical (outer) and dispositional (inner) elements of an interlocutor’s identity in contexts involving spontaneous and unscripted face-to-face dialog. Four articles and two additional chapters have been developed for this thesis. Chapter 1, “Introducing and situating the cyranoid method” presents an overview of the cyranoid method alongside an analysis of documents pertaining to the method contained in the Stanley Milgram Papers archive at Yale University and situates the method in the context of the demise of the classical paradigm, or “golden age,” of social psychology. Chapter 2 (Article 1), “Replicating Milgram” (published in the Journal of Social Psychology under the title “Revisiting Milgram’s cyranoid method: Experimenting with hybrid human agents”), examines the cyranic illusion through replications of two of Milgram’s original pilot studies and discusses the method’s potential as a means of conducting person perception. Chapter 3 (Article 2), “Echoborgs: Cyranoids with computer program sources” (published in Frontiers in Psychology under the title “A truly human interface: Interacting face-to-face with someone whose words are determined by a computer program”), expands upon the traditional cyranoid method by exploring situations wherein a conversational agent (a computer program designed to mimic a human interlocutor) sources for a human shadower, thereby producing a special type of cyranoid known as an “echoborg”; the article places the echoborg within the context of android science, a field that uses humanlike machines as stimuli in social psychological research in order to explore various aspects of human interaction (Ishiguro & Nishio, 2007). Chapter 4 (Article 3), “Using echoborgs to assess intersubjective effort in human-agent dialog” (accepted for publication pending minor revisions in Computers in Human Behavior), combines conversation analysis techniques (e.g., Schegloff, 1992, 1993) with the echoborg method to investigate factors that influence how people repair misunderstandings that arise during dialog with conversational agents. Chapter 5 (Article 4), “Cyranoids in first-person, self-experimental research” (published in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science under the title “The researcher as experimental subject: Using self-experimentation to access experiences, understand social phenomena, and stimulate reflexivity”), explores the history of researcher-as-subject self-experimentation in social psychology and illustrates how the cyranoid method can be used as a first-person means of directly experiencing the consequences of a transformed social identity through systematic self-experimentation. Finally, Chapter 6, “Cyranoid ethics,” discusses the various ethical concerns involved in cyranoid research, outlines how they were mitigated in the current thesis, and offers suggestions for ensuring positive research participant experience. As Milgram died before publishing any work on the cyranoid method, and as speech shadowing has seen relatively little application in social psychological experimentation, this thesis attempts to provide the initial basis for future iterations and variants of the method

The researcher as experimental subject: using self-experimentation to access experiences, understand social phenomena, and stimulate reflexivity

The current article argues that researcher-as-subject self-experimentation can provide valuable insight and systematic knowledge to social psychologists. This approach, the modus operandi of experimental psychology when the field was in its infancy, has been largely eclipsed by an almost exclusive focus on participant-as-subject other-experimentation. Drawing from the non-experimental first-person traditions of autoethnography, participant observation, and phenomenology, we argue that participating as both observer and subject within one’s own social psychological experiment affords researchers at least three potential benefits: (1) access to “social qualia,” that is, the subjective experience of social phenomena; (2) improved mental models of social phenomena, potentially stimulating new research questions; and (3) an enhanced ability to be reflexive about the given experiment. To support our position, we provide first-person self-reflections from researchers who have self-experimented with transformed social interactions involving Milgram’s cyranoid method. We close by offering guidelines on how one might approach self-experimentation, and discuss a variety of first-person perspective ethnographic technologies that can be incorporated into the practice

Application of effect-based methods (EBMs) in a river basin: a preliminary study in Central Italy

Introduction. Effect-based methods (EBMs), i.e. in vitro and in vivo bioassays, represent innovative tools for the effect detection of environmental chemical pollutants on living organisms. The aim of this study was to evaluate the water quality of a river ecosystem implementing two in vivo bioassays on target freshwater animal species: the crustacean Daphnia magna and the small fish Danio rerio, also known as zebrafish.Materials and methods. The methods applied in this study, i.e. the Daphnia sp. Acute Immobilisation assay and the Fish Embryo Acute Toxicity (FET) test, are commonly used in water quality research and their application in short-term ecotoxicity detection is suggested by recent European projects. Two sampling sites were chosen in the urban part of the Tiber River in Rome, while a third one was chosen as a reference site in the Farfa River, a tributary upstream of the city. The sites in the Tiber River are potentially affected by different pollution sources, including urban and industrial wastewater discharges, the pesticide release, livestock waste products, and waste dumps.Results and discussion. The results of the study showed wide differences between the two applied bioassays. The FET test was generally more sensitive in detecting even low effects in all the water samples, but the strongest statistically results were observed with the D. magna Acute Immobilisation test. The results of this research confirm the effectiveness of EBMs in investigating and monitoring water chemical pollution, and stress the need for performing further studies, e.g. chemical analyses and other bioassays, to improve the knowledge of the health status of the Tiber River basin.Conclusions. Further results will aim to support the local authorities in adopting measures to reduce and to eliminate the sources of chemical pollution in the study area

In and out domains. Playful principles to in-form urban solutions

The implementation of games in architecture and urban planning has a long history since the 1960s and is still a preferential tool to foster public participation and address contemporary spatial – and social - conflicts within the urban fabric. Moreover, in the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness – together with ludic dynamics and mechanics - as an applied methodology to deal with complex challenges, and deeper comprehend emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects through the use of the PLEX/CIVIC framework. Like many creative professions, we believe that architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games facilitate long-term planning processes and help to solve migration issues, allowing citizens themselves to take their responsibility and contribute to durable solutions

Energy deposition studies for the Upgrade II of LHCb at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

The Upgrade II of the LHCb experiment is proposed to be installed during the CERN Long Shutdown 4, aiming to operate LHCb at 1.5x$10^{34}cm^{-2}s^{-1}$ that is 75 times its design luminosity and reaching an integrated luminosity of about $400 fb^{-1}$ by the end of the High Luminosity LHC era. This increase of the data sample at LHCb is an unprecedented opportunity for heavy flavour physics measurements. A first upgrade of LHCb, completed in 2022, has already implemented important changes of the LHCb detector and, for the Upgrade II, further detector improvements are being considered. Such a luminosity increase will have an impact not only on the LHCb detector but also on the LHC magnets, cryogenics and electronic equipment placed in the IR8. In fact, the LHCb experiment was conceived to work at a much lower luminosity than ATLAS and CMS, implying minor requirements for protection of the LHC elements from the collision debris and therefore a different layout around the interaction point. The luminosity target proposed for the Upgrade II requires to review the layout of the entire insertion region in order to ensure safe operation of the LHC magnets and to mitigate the risk of failure of the electronic devices. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the implications of the Upgrade II of LHCb in the experimental cavern and in the tunnel with a focus on the LHCb detector, electronic devices and accelerator magnets

Co-constructing intersubjectivity with artificial conversational agents: people are more likely to initiate repairs of misunderstandings with agents represented as human

This article explores whether people more frequently attempt to repair misunderstandings when speaking to an artificial conversational agent if it is represented as fully human. Interactants in dyadic conversations with an agent (the chat bot Cleverbot) spoke to either a text screen interface (agent's responses shown on a screen) or a human body interface (agent's responses vocalized by a human speech shadower via the echoborg method) and were either informed or not informed prior to interlocution that their interlocutor's responses would be agent-generated. Results show that an interactant is less likely to initiate repairs when an agent-interlocutor communicates via a text screen interface as well as when they explicitly know their interlocutor's words to be agent-generated. That is to say, people demonstrate the most “intersubjective effort” toward establishing common ground when they engage an agent under the same social psychological conditions as face-to-face human-human interaction (i.e., when they both encounter another human body and assume that they are speaking to an autonomously-communicating person). This article's methodology presents a novel means of benchmarking intersubjectivity and intersubjective effort in human-agent interaction

Detector Simulation Challenges for Future Accelerator Experiments

Detector simulation is a key component for studies on prospective future high-energy colliders, the design, optimization, testing and operation of particle physics experiments, and the analysis of the data collected to perform physics measurements. This review starts from the current state of the art technology applied to detector simulation in high-energy physics and elaborates on the evolution of software tools developed to address the challenges posed by future accelerator programs beyond the HL-LHC era, into the 2030–2050 period. New accelerator, detector, and computing technologies set the stage for an exercise in how detector simulation will serve the needs of the high-energy physics programs of the mid 21st century, and its potential impact on other research domains