Trusting in Machines: How Mode of Interaction Affects Willingness to Share Personal Information with Machines

Every day, people make decisions about whether to trust machines with their personal information, such as letting a phone track one’s location. How do people decide whether to trust a machine? In a field experiment, we tested how two modes of interaction-”expression modality, whether the person is talking or typing to a machine, and response modality, whether the machine is talking or typing back-”influence the willingness to trust a machine. Based on research that expressing oneself verbally reduces self-control compared to nonverbal expression, we predicted that talking to a machine might make people more willing to share their personal information. Based on research on the link between anthropomorphism and trust, we further predicted that machines who talked (versus texted) would seem more human-like and be trusted more. Using a popular chatterbot phone application, we randomly assigned over 300 community members to either talk or type to the phone, which either talked or typed in return. We then measured how much participants anthropomorphized the machine and their willingness to share their personal information (e.g., their location, credit card information) with it. Results revealed that talking made people more willing to share their personal information than texting, and this was robust to participants’ self-reported comfort with technology, age, gender, and conversation characteristics. But listening to the application’s voice did not affect anthropomorphism or trust compared to reading its text. We conclude by considering the theoretical and practical implications of this experiment for understanding how people trust machines

My Finite Field

A love poem written in the language of mathematics

Whose toilet is it anyway? : an ethnographic investigation into communally managed and municipally-managed janitor-serviced sanitation facilities in Masiphumelele, Cape Town

Informal settlement sanitation service delivery continues as one the most urgent, imposing challenges of contemporary basic service provision in South Africa. Municipal, provincial and national sanitation and political authorities expect informal settlement residents to take ownership of and responsibility for state-installed toilet facilities, with municipally-managed janitorial services also in operation in many settlements countrywide. Yet resident-driven sanitation management practices and the site-specific realities of informal settlements have not been adequately understood nor have they informed basic service delivery development. This has in part led to uncertainty in terms of how to designate and sustain responsibilities to relevant stakeholders regarding sanitation maintenance. Based on fieldwork in the Masiphumelele Wetlands informal settlement and temporary relocation area on Cape Town's southern peninsula, this dissertation describes a range of communally-managed sanitation systems that operate alongside municipally-managed janitorial services and which demonstrate varying degrees of local senses of ownership of responsibility for municipally-provided flush toilet facilities. A bottom-up, iterative development approach is argued for, one that critically considers the spectrum of factors that constrain and stimulate ownership and responsibility by informal settlement residents as well as the cultural contingencies that constitute communal sanitation management in informal settlements

Adaptive Complex Contagions and Threshold Dynamical Systems

A broad range of nonlinear processes over networks are governed by threshold dynamics. So far, existing mathematical theory characterizing the behavior of such systems has largely been concerned with the case where the thresholds are static. In this paper we extend current theory of finite dynamical systems to cover dynamic thresholds. Three classes of parallel and sequential dynamic threshold systems are introduced and analyzed. Our main result, which is a complete characterization of their attractor structures, show that sequential systems may only have fixed points as limit sets whereas parallel systems may only have period orbits of size at most two as limit sets. The attractor states are characterized for general graphs and enumerated in the special case of paths and cycle graphs; a computational algorithm is outlined for determining the number of fixed points over a tree. We expect our results to be relevant for modeling a broad class of biological, behavioral and socio-technical systems where adaptive behavior is central.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Finding dex-1 Phenotype Suppressing Components

Caenorhabditis elegans is a species of microscopic round worm that has been used as a genetic model for over forty years. When in an adverse environment, C. elegans larvae cease reproductive development and enter the stress-resistant dauer stage. dex-1 mutants of C. elegans are deficient in this protein, resulting in shortened dendrites and a sensitivity to sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). SDS will kill any non-dauer C. elegans, but wild type dauers will survive well past the standard concentration of 1% SDS. Thus, treatment with SDS is commonly how labs isolate dauers. By contrast, dex-1 dauers (Fig.3) will die when exposed to 1% SDS, but can potentially survive when exposed to less. The focus of this lab is to characterize the genetic pathways that facilitate morphological changes that occur during the dauer stage by finding potential interactors of dex-1 during dauer when conducting a suppressor screen

Wireless Environmental Weather Monitor

The goal of this senior design/honors project is to create a device that monitors environmental conditions in order to detect a wildfire. This device should notify a user of the status of the environment. The device should also last for 6 months without any human interaction. My role on the team is to design the power supply system that maximizes efficiency and uses renewable energy

Defining and Measuring Equity in Public Transportation

Transit should serve all users, regardless of age, race, ability, or any other identity. Policies and planning must be conscious of inequities when defining and measuring equity in public transportation. This study was done to aid the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the state’s transit agencies in assessing transit service equity and assisting with evaluating past, existing, and future inequities. This report identifies and evaluates policies and practices associated with equity measurement in public transit from extant academic and professional literature sources. These include the Federal laws and regulations addressing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the measurement tools (i.e., metrics) that are used to identify and evaluate equity impacts related to transit benefits and costs. The report identifies a list of candidate metrics and applies them to a test case in Santa Cruz County, California, and compares their results to those generated by the metrics required by Title VI (race and income) for transit equity analysis. From this comparison, the study evaluated the need for new metrics in transit equity. Findings suggest that these traditional Title VI measures do not correlate well with other potential measures of inequity. Hence, transit inequity is a multifaceted problem with several potential different measures, each revealing an aspect of inequity. Caltrans and other transit-related agencies need to reach beyond these traditional measures, finding metrics that address the specific, context-appropriate equity conditions of the communities they are measuring to ensure fair and equal public transportation for all

Non-lethal foam deployment system for vehicle stopping

Master of ScienceDepartment of Chemical EngineeringLarry A. GlasgowThe military is interested in stopping suspicious vehicles at checkpoints or security positions while minimizing noncombatant fatalities. Preliminary work has shown that decreasing the oxygen concentration in proximity to the automobile air intake system and blocking the air flow through an automotive induction system provides the greatest probability of success for the broadest possible array of internal combustion engines. A non-lethal foam deployment system was developed that satisfies the military’s needs to stop suspicious vehicles. The foam is discharged from a pressurized tank and engulfs the air intake system of the target vehicle. The foam is drawn into the air intake and the protein additive contained in the foam would occlude pores in the air filter medium. Once the air filter was blocked, the vehicle would become immobilized so that security personnel can secure the vehicle. The work carried out in this project consisted of development and refinement of surfactant solution composition, improvement in the rate of absorption of carbon dioxide for increased foam volume, and characterization of discharge for optimum foam volume. In addition, a half-scale model apparatus was developed to test the foam’s ability to be ingested in an automotive intake system. These experiments demonstrated that the foam deployment system would stop an automobile within six seconds

Ultra-compact optical auto-correlator based on slow-light enhanced third harmonic generation in a silicon photonic crystal waveguide

The ability to use coherent light for material science and applications is directly linked to our ability to measure short optical pulses. While free-space optical methods are well-established, achieving this on a chip would offer the greatest benefit in footprint, performance, flexibility and cost, and allow the integration with complementary signal processing devices. A key goal is to achieve operation at sub-Watt peak power levels and on sub-picosecond timescales. Previous integrated demonstrations require either a temporally synchronized reference pulse, an off-chip spectrometer, or long tunable delay lines. We report the first device capable of achieving single-shot time-domain measurements of near-infrared picosecond pulses based on an ultra-compact integrated CMOS compatible device, with the potential to be fully integrated without any external instrumentation. It relies on optical third-harmonic generation in a slow-light silicon waveguide. Our method can also serve as a powerful in-situ diagnostic tool to directly map, at visible wavelengths, the propagation dynamics of near-infrared pulses in photonic crystals.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 38 reference