Search

Advancements and implementations of autonomous systems coincide with an increased concern for the ethical implications resulting from their use. This is increasingly relevant as autonomy fulfills teammate roles in contexts that demand ethical considerations. As AI teammates (ATs) enter these roles, research is needed to explore how an AT’s ethics influences human trust. This current research presents two studies which explore how an AT’s ethical or unethical behavior impacts trust in that teammate. In Study 1, participants responded to scenarios of an AT recommending actions which violated or abided by a set of ethical principles. The results suggest that ethicality perceptions and trust are influenced by ethical violations, but only ethicality depends on the type of ethical violation. Participants in Study 2 completed a focus group interview after performing a team task with a simulated AT that committed ethical violations and attempted to repair trust (apology or denial). The focus group responses suggest that ethical violations worsened perceptions of the AT and decreased trust, but it could still be trusted to perform tasks. The AT’s apologies and denials did not repair damaged trust. The studies’ findings suggest a nuanced relationship between trust and ethics and a need for further investigation into trust repair strategies following ethical violations.

Human-automation interactions are rapidly transitioning from single-component automated systems to multiple-component systems. The human-automation literature has yet to adequately explore trust within multiple-component systems. A currently unanswered question is whether one faulty component causes an operator to lose trust in that one component (Component-Specific Trust; CST) or in every component in the system (System-Wide Trust; SWT). The goals of this paper were to 1) summarize the current work on trust in multiple-component systems, and 2) identify any trends that emerge during the literature review. We reviewed 17 experimental studies that tested whether operators tend to adopt CST or SWT under different conditions. Overall, most studies suggest that operators adopt SWT. However, studies that provided the operator with high decisional freedom and more time with the automated systems suggest that CST is the dominant strategy. Future work should explicitly test these and other variables that may promote users to adopt CST.

Consumer automation is a suitable venue for studying the efficacy of untested humanness design methods for promoting specific trust in multi-component systems. Subjective (trust, self-confidence) and behavioural (use, manual override) measures were recorded as 82 participants interacted with a four-component automation-bearing system in a simulated smart home task for two experimental blocks. During the first block all components were perfectly reliable (100%). During the second block, one component became unreliable (60%). Participants interacted with a system containing either a single or four simulated voice assistants. In the single-assistant condition, the unreliable component resulted in trust changes for every component. In the four-assistant condition, trust decreased for only the unreliable component. Across agent-number conditions, use decreased between blocks for only the unreliable component. Self-confidence and overrides exhibited ceiling and floor effects, respectively. Our findings provide the first evidence of effectively using humanness design to enhance component-specific trust in consumer systems.

Objective Determining the efficacy of two trust repair strategies (apology and denial) for trust violations of an ethical nature by an autonomous teammate. Background While ethics in human-AI interaction is extensively studied, little research has investigated how decisions with ethical implications impact trust and performance within human-AI teams and their subsequent repair. Method Forty teams of two participants and one autonomous teammate completed three team missions within a synthetic task environment. The autonomous teammate made an ethical or unethical action during each mission, followed by an apology or denial. Measures of individual team trust, autonomous teammate trust, human teammate trust, perceived autonomous teammate ethicality, and team performance were taken. Results Teams with unethical autonomous teammates had significantly lower trust in the team and trust in the autonomous teammate. Unethical autonomous teammates were also perceived as substantially more unethical. Neither trust repair strategy effectively restored trust after an ethical violation, and autonomous teammate ethicality was not related to the team score, but unethical autonomous teammates did have shorter times. Conclusion Ethical violations significantly harm trust in the overall team and autonomous teammate but do not negatively impact team score. However, current trust repair strategies like apologies and denials appear ineffective in restoring trust after this type of violation. Application This research highlights the need to develop trust repair strategies specific to human-AI teams and trust violations of an ethical nature.

Trust is a critical factor in successful and productive human-automation interactions. Human trust in machines is sensitive to machine performance. When automation malfunctions, trust is negatively affected. The development of increasingly complex multiple-component systems, or those with several autonomous elements, introduces even more ways for a system to err. One example is in smart home control systems where different subsystems may be controlled by different autonomous routines or rules. Multiple studies suggest that one error-prone component can lower user trust in the remaining components. This has been termed a “pull down effect.” Other research suggests that increasing the amount of information presented to the user can reduce the strength of the pull down effect by promoting heterogeneity of components. Although a majority of this research has been tested in the industrial domain, there exist certain types of information that are best suited for consumer automation (e.g., granting the automation a name and a voice). Providing this kind of information to the user may diminish the strength of the pull down effect. Thus, the current study will investigate the effectiveness of trust-preserving heterogeneity strategies in consumer multiple-component systems.

The diurnal dynamics of leaf-rolling in maize genotypes as measured by visual scoring are strongly correlated with corresponding measurements made using digital hemispherical photography, leading to the potential for development of high-throughput techniques for phenotyping in the field., Leaf rolling in maize crops is one of the main plant reactions to water stress that can be visually scored in the field. However, leaf-scoring techniques do not meet the high-throughput requirements needed by breeders for efficient phenotyping. Consequently, this study investigated the relationship between leaf-rolling scores and changes in canopy structure that can be determined by high-throughput remote-sensing techniques. Experiments were conducted in 2015 and 2016 on maize genotypes subjected to water stress. Leaf-rolling was scored visually over the whole day around the flowering stage. Concurrent digital hemispherical photographs were taken to evaluate the impact of leaf-rolling on canopy structure using the computed fraction of intercepted diffuse photosynthetically active radiation, FIPARdif. The results showed that leaves started to roll due to water stress around 09:00 h and leaf-rolling reached its maximum around 15:00 h (the photoperiod was about 05:00–20:00 h). In contrast, plants maintained under well-watered conditions did not show any significant rolling during the same day. A canopy-level index of rolling (CLIR) is proposed to quantify the diurnal changes in canopy structure induced by leaf-rolling. It normalizes for the differences in FIPARdif between genotypes observed in the early morning when leaves are unrolled, as well as for yearly effects linked to environmental conditions. Leaf-level rolling score was very strongly correlated with changes in canopy structure as described by the CLIR (r2=0.86, n=370). The daily time course of rolling was characterized using the amplitude of variation, and the rate and the timing of development computed at both the leaf and canopy levels. Results obtained from eight genotypes common between the two years of experiments showed that the amplitude of variation of the CLIR was the more repeatable trait (Spearman coefficient ρ=0.62) as compared to the rate (ρ=0.29) and the timing of development (ρ=0.33). The potential of these findings for the development of a high-throughput method for determining leaf-rolling based on aerial drone observations are considered.

Introduction: The use of shared automated vehicles (SAVs) should lead to several societal and individual benefits, including reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced traffic, and improved mobility for persons who cannot safely drive themselves. We define SAVs as on-demand, fully automated vehicles in which passengers are paired with other riders traveling along a similar route. Previous research has shown that younger adults are more likely to report using conventional ridesharing services and are more accepting of new technologies including automated vehicles (AVs). However, older adults, particularly those who may be close to retiring from driving, stand to greatly benefit from SAV services. In order for SAVs to deliver on their aforementioned benefits, they must be viewed favorably and utilized. We sought to investigate how short educational and/or experiential videos might impact younger, middle-aged, and older adult respondents’ anticipated acceptance and attitudes toward SAVs. Knowing what types of introductory experiences improve different age groups’ perceptions of SAVs will be beneficial for tailoring campaigns aiming to promote SAV usage. Methods: We deployed an online survey using the platform Prolific for middle-aged and older respondents, and our departmental participant pool for younger adults, collecting 585 total responses that resulted in 448 valid responses. Respondents answered questions regarding their demographic attributes, their ridesharing history, preconceptions of technology, as well as their anticipated acceptance attitudes towards SAVs as measured by the dimensions of the Automated Vehicle User Perception Survey (AVUPS). After this, respondents were randomly assigned to an intervention condition where they either watched 1) an educational video about how SAVs work and their potential benefits, 2) an experiential video showing a AV navigating traffic, 3) both the experiential and educational videos, or 4) a control video explaining how ridesharing works. Anticipated acceptance attitudes towards SAVs were measured again after this intervention and difference scores calculated to investigate the effect of the intervention conditions. Prolific respondents were paid at a rate of $9.50/hour and younger adults received course credit. Results: Controlling for preconceptions of technology and ridesharing experience, a MANOVA was run on the difference scores of the dimensions of the AVUPS (intention to use, trust/reliability, perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), safety, control/driving-efficacy, cost, authority, media, and social influence). Both older and middle-aged adults expressed significantly greater increases in PEOU and PU of SAVs than younger adults. We also observed an interaction between age and condition for both PU and PEOU. For PU, older adults’ difference scores were found to be significantly greater than younger adults’ for the control video condition. With PEOU, older adults’ difference scores were significantly greater than both younger adults’ for the control video condition, and middle-aged adults had greater difference scores for the educational-only video condition than younger or older adults. Discussion: The increases in PU observed for older adults in the control condition suggests that educating them on how to use currently available ridesharing services might transfer to and/or highlight the benefits that automated ridesharing might provide. The PEOU interactions also suggest that middle-aged adults might respond more positively than younger or older adults to an educational introduction to SAVs. Conclusion: The positive findings pertaining to PU and PEOU show that exposure to information related to SAVs has a positive impact on these attitudes. PU’s and PEOU’s positive relationship to behavioral intentions (BI) in the Technology Acceptance Model, coupled with the findings from this study, bode well for higher fidelity interventions seeking to inform and/or give individuals experience with SAVs. Providing information on how currently available ridesharing services work helped our older adult respondents recognize the potential usefulness of SAVs. Knowing that different age groups may respond better to educational versus experiential interventions, for example middle-aged adults in this study responding more positively to the educational video condition than younger or older adults, may be useful for targeted promotional campaigns.

Leaf rolling in maize crops is one of the main plant reactions to water stress that may be visually scored in the field. However, the leaf scoring did not reach the high-throughput desired by breeders for efficient phenotyping. This study investigates the relationship between leaf rolling score and the induced canopy structure changes that may be accessed by high-throughput remote sensing techniques.Results gathered over a field phenotyping platform run in 2015 and 2016 show that leaf starts to roll for the water stressed conditions around 9:00 and reaches its maximum around 15:00. Conversely, genotypes conducted under well watered conditions do not show any significant rolling during the same day. Leaf level rolling was very strongly correlated to canopy structure changes as described by the fraction of intercepted radiationfIPARWSderived from digital hemispherical photography. The changes infIPARWSwere stronly correlated (R2=0.86,n=50) to the leaf level rolling visual score. Further, a very good consistency of the genotype ranking of thefIPARWSchanges during the day was found (ρ=0.62). This study demonstrating the strong coordination between leaf level rolling and its impact on canopy structure changes poses the basis for new high-throughput remote sensing methods to quantify this water stress trait.HighlighThe diurnal dynamics of leaf rolling scored visually is strongly related to canopy structure changes that can be documented using Digital hemispherical photography. Consequences for high-throughput field phenotyping are discussed

The dark matter time projection chamber (DMTPC) is a direction-sensitive detector designed to measure the direction of recoiling $^{19}\mathrm{F}$ and $^{12}\mathrm{C}$ nuclei in low-pressure ${\mathrm{CF}}_{4}$ gas using optical and charge readout systems. In this paper, we employ measurements from two DMTPC detectors, with operating pressures of 30--60 torr, to develop and validate a model of the directional response and performance of such detectors as a function of recoil energy. Using our model as a benchmark, we formulate the necessary specifications for a scalable directional detector with sensitivity comparable to that of current-generation counting (nondirectional) experiments, which measure only recoil energy. Assuming the performance of existing DMTPC detectors, as well as current limits on the spin-dependent WIMP-nucleus cross section, we find that a 10--20 kg scale direction-sensitive detector is capable of correlating the measured direction of nuclear recoils with the predicted direction of incident dark matter particles and providing decisive ($3\ensuremath{\sigma}$) confirmation that a candidate signal from a nondirectional experiment was indeed induced by elastic scattering of dark matter particles off of target nuclei.

This chapter examines the theatrical experience provided by early modern dumb shows and the critical tradition that has emerged around them. It argues that dumb shows are a threshold between drama and theatricality, and that they vividly represent not only the contest between text and performance for authority over theatrical meaning, but also the tendency of each to displace this authority onto the other. In the canon of early modern theatre and in the modern critical tradition, dumb shows are often a sign of a derivative theatricality directed at a merely popular audience. In the dumb show, there is an especially complex and self-conscious encounter between word and action, diegesis and mimesis, presentational vehicles and represented fiction. As a moment of extraordinary semiotic density and redundancy, the dumb show was at once too readerly for the stage and too spectacular for the printed book. The chapter also considers ‘Hamlet’s advice to the players’ and its implications for approaches and responses to the dumb show.

The T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) experiment is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment using the neutrino beamline at the J-PARC facility in Japan. T2K measures the neutrino beam at two near detectors located 280 m from the target and again at Super-Kamiokande, 295 km away. With measurements of the oscillated neutrinos at Super-Kamiokande and constraints from the near detectors, T2K is able to provide high precision measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters. T2K provided the first evidence for a non-zero value of the mixing angle \theta_{13} and has continued improving its results with a joint fit to muon neutrino disappearance and electron neutrino appearance samples. In 2015, T2K also released its first result on antineutrino oscillations. This work provides a summary of recent results in neutrino oscillation physics from T2K and also briefly discusses some of the other work done by T2K.

The 4Shooter is a prototype dark matter detector built by the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber (DMTPC) collaboration. The aim of the collaboration is to observe dark matter with directional sensitivity by measuring the recoil directions of nuclei struck by dark matter particles. The 4Shooter is a single time projection chamber containing CF4 gas, with both optical (CCD and photomultiplier tube) and charge readout. This paper describes the 4Shooter and presents results from the commissioning of the detector in a surface laboratory.

The Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber (DMTPC) collaboration is developing a low-pressure gas TPC for detecting WIMP-nucleon interactions. DMTPC detectors use optical readout with CCD cameras to search for the daily modulation of the directional signal of the dark matter wind. An analysis of several charge readout channels has been developed to obtain additional information about ionization events in the detector. In order to reach sensitivities required for the WIMP detection, the detector needs to minimize backgrounds from electron recoils. This article shows that by using the readout of charge signals in addition to CCD readout, a preliminary statistics-limited 90% C.L. upper limit on the γ and e[superscript −] rejection factor of 5.6 × 10[superscript −6] is obtained for energies between 40 keV[subscript ee] and 200 keV[subscript ee]., United States. Dept. of Energy (Grant DE-FG02-05ER41360), United States. Dept. of Energy. Advanced Detector Research Program (Contract 6916448), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. James H. Ferry Fund for Innovation in Research Education, MIT Department of Physics Pappalardo Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Charles E. Reed Faculty Initiative Fund), Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics, Bates Linear Accelerator Center

A survey of some rhetorical conventions for representing present/contemporaneous experience in the academic theatre review. The rhetorical attitude of the reviewer towards the present moment typically suggests that the function of a theatre review is to record the timelessness, rather than the historicity, of a given production. But to record what seems timeless in a given production is to imagine a reader outside of history rather than a reader for whom – as must be the case if theatre reviews are to be considered an archive – the reviewer's present is itself historical, perhaps distantly and unfamiliarly so. To record more vividly the pressures of a reviewer's contemporary experience upon his or her experience of a production might be to communicate to a future reader the ways in which the construction and interpretation of Shakespearean staging and meaning arise out of a dialectical relation between the immediate, vanishing present and the once-contemporary past.

A review of “The Revenger’s Tragedy” at the National Theatre and “Hamlet” and “The Taming of the Shrew” at the Royal Shakespeare Company, summer 2008. This essay analyzes the way theatrical effects in these productions were developed out of an overlap or collision between different performative rhetorics and vocabularies: filmic, televisual, and theatrical. And it attempts to raise some complex questions about the role classical repertory theatre can play in providing spectators access to the radical cultural, temporal, and ideological otherness that makes early modern dramatic literature such a fertile field for critical engagement and interpretation.

It is commonly assumed that Shakespeare scholars and teachers can learn something about Shakespeare's plays-about the textual, interpretive, and theatrical possibilities they contain-from productions of these plays at such venues as London's new Globe, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stratford, Ontario. This essay, which gives an account of sixteen Shakespeare productions and adaptations at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, argues that we can also learn something about Shakespeare's plays from productions by high-school students, college students, and amateur theatrical troupes.1 Academic criticism does not pay a great deal of attention to amateur and student productions for what seem like obvious reasons: such productions have limited resources, and the acting is not always very good. But without making unreasonable claims for the pleasures of amateur theatricals, I would like to suggest that, in terms of theater scholarship and theater history, the standards represented by the new Globe, the two Stratfords, and their analogues are too conservative and too homogeneous. In the pages that follow I will describe what I take to be some remarkable successes by amateur and student performers-moments in which theatrical ideas are conveyed with clarity and energy characteristic of the best acting at any level. I will also describe some predictable failures-moments (or whole productions) in which the opportunity to express a theatrical idea is deliberately squandered, moments that are typical of the most cynical and lazy kind of Shakespearean acting at any level. I am here concerned with something that theater reviews do not focus on enough: the relationship between actors and audience. Amateur productions compel the reviewer to ask "why am I here?" The reasons we go to the Globe or to Stratford-upon-Avon seem self-evident; consequently, it is easy to record the details of those productions so as to suggest that such details are interesting in and of themselves. We become less like audience members and more like stenographers. In contrast, spending a beautiful