With the rapid evolution of technology, computers and their users’ workspaces have become an essential part of our life in general. Today, many people use computers both for work and for personal needs, spending long hours sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen, changing their pose slightly from time to time. This phenomenon impacts people’s health negatively, adversely affecting their musculoskeletal and ocular systems. To mitigate these risks, several different ergonomic solutions have been suggested. This study proposes, demonstrates, and evaluates a technological solution that automatically adjusts the computer screen position and orientation to its user’s current pose, using a simple RGB camera and robotic arm. The automatic adjustment will reduce the physical load on users and better fit their changing poses. The user’s pose is extracted from images continuously acquired by the system’s camera. The most suitable screen position is calculated according to the user’s pose and ergonomic guidelines. Thereafter, the robotic arm adjusts the screen accordingly. The evaluation was done through a user study with 35 users who rated both the idea and the prototype system itself highly.
We propose a new research framework by which the nascent discipline of human-AI teaming can be explored within experimental environments in preparation for transferal to real-world contexts. We examine the existing literature and unanswered research questions through the lens of an Agile approach to construct our proposed framework. Our framework aims to provide a structure for understanding the macro features of this research landscape, supporting holistic research into the acceptability of human-AI teaming to human team members and the affordances of AI team members. The framework has the potential to enhance decision-making and performance of hybrid human-AI teams. Further, our framework proposes the application of Agile methodology for research management and knowledge discovery. We propose a transferability pathway for hybrid teaming to be initially tested in a safe environment, such as a real-time strategy video game, with elements of lessons learned that can be transferred to real-world situations.
The traditional matrix factorisation (MF)-based recommender system methods, despite their success in making the recommendation, lack explainable recommendations as the produced latent features are meaningless and cannot explain the recommendation. This article introduces an MF-based explainable recommender system framework that utilises the user-item rating data and the available item information to model meaningful user and item latent features. These features are exploited to enhance the rating prediction accuracy and the recommendation explainability. Our proposed feature-based explainable recommender system framework utilises these meaningful user and item latent features to explain the recommendation without relying on private or outer data. The recommendations are explained to the user using text message and bar chart. Our proposed model has been evaluated in terms of the rating prediction accuracy and the reasonableness of the explanation using six real-world benchmark datasets for movies, books, video games, and fashion recommendation systems. The results show that the proposed model can produce accurate explainable recommendations.
Ensuring fairness in artificial intelligence (AI) is important to counteract bias and discrimination in far-reaching applications. Recent work has started to investigate how humans judge fairness and how to support machine learning experts in making their AI models fairer. Drawing inspiration from an Explainable AI approach called explanatory debugging used in interactive machine learning, our work explores designing interpretable and interactive human-in-the-loop interfaces that allow ordinary end-users without any technical or domain background to identify potential fairness issues and possibly fix them in the context of loan decisions. Through workshops with end-users, we co-designed and implemented a prototype system that allowed end-users to see why predictions were made, and then to change weights on features to “debug” fairness issues. We evaluated the use of this prototype system through an online study. To investigate the implications of diverse human values about fairness around the globe, we also explored how cultural dimensions might play a role in using this prototype. Our results contribute to the design of interfaces to allow end-users to be involved in judging and addressing AI fairness through a human-in-the-loop approach.
Sketching is an intuitive and simple way to depict sciences with various object form and appearance characteristics. In the past few years, widely available touchscreen devices have increasingly made sketch-based human-AI co-creation applications popular. One key issue of sketch-oriented interaction is to prepare input sketches efficiently by non-professionals because it is usually difficult and time-consuming to draw an ideal sketch with appropriate outlines and rich details, especially for novice users with no sketching skills. Thus, sketching brings great obstacles for sketch applications in daily life. On the other hand, hand-drawn sketches are scarce and hard to collect. Given the fact that there are several large-scale sketch datasets providing sketch data resources, but they usually have a limited number of objects and categories in sketch, and do not support users to collect new sketch materials according to their personal preferences. In addition, few sketch-related applications support the reuse of existing sketch elements. Thus, knowing how to extract sketches from existing drawings and effectively re-use them in interactive scene sketch composition will provide an elegant way for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) applications, which are widely used in various touch screen devices. In this study, we first conduct a study on current SBIR to better understand the main requirements and challenges in sketch-oriented applications. Then we develop the SketchMaker as an interactive sketch extraction and composition system to help users generate scene sketches via reusing object sketches in existing scene sketches with minimal manual intervention. Moreover, we demonstrate how SBIR improves from composited scene sketches to verify the performance of our interactive sketch processing system. We also include a sketch-based video localization task as an alternative application of our sketch composition scheme. Our pilot study shows that our system is effective and efficient, and provides a way to promote practical applications of sketches.
Designing games is a complicated and time-consuming process, where developing new levels for existing games can take weeks. Procedural content generation offers the potential to shorten this timeframe, however, automated design tools are not adopted widely in the game industry. This article presents an expert evaluation of a human-in-the-loop generative design approach for commercial game maps that incorporates multiple computational agents. The evaluation aims to gauge the extent to which such an approach could support and be accepted by human game designers and to determine whether the computational agents improve the overall design. To evaluate the approach, 11 game designers utilized the approach to design game levels with the computational agents both active and inactive. Eye-tracking, observational, and think-aloud data was collected to determine whether designers favored levels suggested by the computational agents. This data was triangulated with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews that were used to gather overall opinions of the approach. The eye-tracking data indicates that the participating game level designers showed a clear preference for levels suggested by the computational agents, however, expert designers in particular appeared to reject the idea that the computational agents are helpful. The perception of computational tools not being useful needs to be addressed if procedural content generation approaches are to fulfill their potential for the game industry.
Fully autonomous driving is on the horizon; vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as Tesla's Autopilot are already available to consumers. However, all currently available ADAS applications require a human driver to be alert and ready to take control if needed. Partially automated driving introduces new complexities to human interactions with cars and can even increase collision risk. A better understanding of drivers’ trust in automation may help reduce these complexities. Much of the existing research on trust in ADAS has relied on use of surveys and physiological measures to assess trust and has been conducted using driving simulators. There have been relatively few studies that use telemetry data from real automated vehicles to assess trust in ADAS. In addition, although some ADAS technologies provide alerts when, for example, drivers’ hands are not on the steering wheel, these systems are not personalized to individual drivers. Needed are adaptive technologies that can help drivers of autonomous vehicles avoid crashes based on multiple real-time data streams. In this paper, we propose an architecture for adaptive autonomous driving assistance. Two layers of multiple sensory fusion models are developed to provide appropriate voice reminders to increase driving safety based on predicted driving status. Results suggest that human trust in automation can be quantified and predicted with 80% accuracy based on vehicle data, and that adaptive speech-based advice can be provided to drivers with 90 to 95% accuracy. With more data, these models can be used to evaluate trust in driving assistance tools, which can ultimately lead to safer and appropriate use of these features.
Historians and archivists often find and analyze the occurrences of query words in newspaper archives to help answer fundamental questions about society. But much work in text analytics focuses on helping people investigate other textual units, such as events, clusters, ranked documents, entity relationships, or thematic hierarchies. Informed by a study into the needs of historians and archivists, we thus propose ClioQuery, a text analytics system uniquely organized around the analysis of query words in context. ClioQuery applies text simplification techniques from natural language processing to help historians quickly and comprehensively gather and analyze all occurrences of a query word across an archive. It also pairs these new NLP methods with more traditional features like linked views and in-text highlighting to help engender trust in summarization techniques. We evaluate ClioQuery with two separate user studies, in which historians explain how ClioQuery’s novel text simplification features can help facilitate historical research. We also evaluate with a separate quantitative comparison study, which shows that ClioQuery helps crowdworkers find and remember historical information. Such results suggest possible new directions for text analytics in other query-oriented settings.
We present a conversational agent designed to provide realistic conversational practice to older adults at risk of isolation or social anxiety, and show the results of a content analysis on a corpus of data collected from experiments with elderly patients interacting with our system. The conversational agent, represented by a virtual avatar, is designed to hold multiple sessions of casual conversation with older adults. Throughout each interaction, the system analyzes the prosodic and nonverbal behavior of users and provides feedback to the user in the form of periodic comments and suggestions on how to improve. Our avatar is unique in its ability to hold natural dialogues on a wide range of everyday topics—27 topics in three groups, developed in collaboration with a team of gerontologists. The three groups vary in “degrees of intimacy,” and as such in degrees of cognitive difficulty for the user. After collecting data from nine participants who interacted with the avatar for seven to nine sessions over a period of 3 to 4 weeks, we present results concerning dialogue behavior and inferred sentiment of the users. Analysis of the dialogues reveals correlations such as greater elaborateness for more difficult topics, increasing elaborateness with successive sessions, stronger sentiments in topics concerned with life goals rather than routine activities, and stronger self-disclosure for more intimate topics. In addition to their intrinsic interest, these results also reflect positively on the sophistication and practical applicability of our dialogue system.