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.

Socially intelligent artificial agents and robots are anticipated to become ubiquitous in home, work, and military environments. With the addition of such agents to human teams it is crucial to evaluate their role in the planning, decision making, and conflict mediation processes. We conducted a study to evaluate the utility of a virtual agent that provided mission planning support in a three-person human team during a military strategic mission planning scenario. The team consisted of a human team lead who made the final decisions and three supporting roles, two humans and the artificial agent. The mission outcome was experimentally designed to fail and introduced a conflict between the human team members and the leader. This conflict was mediated by the artificial agent during the debriefing process through discuss or debate and open communication strategies of conflict resolution [1]. Our results showed that our teams experienced conflict. The teams also responded socially to the virtual agent, although they did not find the agent beneficial to the mediation process. Finally, teams collaborated well together and perceived task proficiency increased for team leaders. Socially intelligent agents show potential for conflict mediation, but need careful design and implementation to improve team processes and collaboration.

It has been observed that a robot shown as suffering is enough to cause an empathic response from a person. Whether the response is a fleeting reaction with no consequences or a meaningful perspective change with associated behavior modifications is not clear. Existing work has been limited to measurements made at the end of empathy inducing experimental trials rather measurements made over time to capture consequential behavioral pattern. We report on preliminary results collected from a study that attempts to measure how the actions of a participant may be altered by empathy for a robot companion. Our findings suggest that induced empathy can in fact have a significant impact on a person's behavior to the extent that the ability to fulfill a mission may be affected.

Strong empathic bonding between members of a team can elevate team performance tremendously but it is not clear how such bonding within human-machine teams may impact upon mission success. Prior work using self-reporting surveys and end-of-task metrics do not capture how such bonding may evolve over time and impact upon task fulfillment. Furthermore, sensor-based measures do not scale easily to facilitate the need to collect substantial data for measuring potentially subtle effects. We introduce TEAMMATE, a system designed to provide insights into the emotional dynamics humans may form for machine teammates that could critically impact upon the design of human machine teams.

Context information brings new opportunities for efficient and effective applications and services on mobile devices. A wide range of research has exploited context dependency, i.e. the relations between context(s) and the outcome, to achieve significant, quantified, performance gains for a variety of applications and services. These works typically have to deal with the challenges of multiple context sources leading to a sparse training dataset, and the challenges of energy hungry context sensors. Often, they address these challenges in an application specific and ad-hoc manner. We liberate mobile application designers and researchers from these burdens by providing a methodical approach to these challenges. In particular, we 1) define and measure the context-dependency of three principal types of mobile usage (visited websites, phone calls, and app usage) in an application agnostic yet practical manner, providing insight into the performance of potential application. 2) Address the challenge of data sparseness when dealing with multiple context sources in a systematic manner. 3) Present SmartContext to address the energy challenge by automatically selecting among context sources while ensuring a minimum accuracy for each estimation. Our analysis and findings are based on one year of usage and context traces collected in real-life settings from 24 iPhone users. We present findings regarding the context dependency of three types of mobile usage from 24 users, yet our methodology and the lessons we learn can be readily extended to other types of usage as well as system resources. Our findings guide the development of context aware systems, and highlight the challenges and expectations regarding the context dependency of mobile usage.

Is it possible to migrate TCP/IP flows between different networks on modern mobile devices without infrastructure support or protocol changes? To answer this question, we make three research contributions: 1) We report a comprehensive characterization of IP traffic on 27 iPhone 3GS users for three months. 2) Driven by these findings, we devise two simple, effective, and easily deployable system mechanisms to support seamless flow migration without network support, and extensively evaluate their effectiveness using our field collected traces of real-life usage. Wait-n-Migrate leverages the fact that most flows are short lived. It establishes new flows on newly available networks but allows preexisting flows on the old network to terminate naturally. Resumption Agent takes advantage of the resumption functionality of modern protocols to securely resume flows without application intervention. Combined, they provide an unprecedented opportunity to immediately deploy policies that leverage multiple networks to improve the performance, efficiency, and connectivity of mobile devices. 3) We report an iPhone-based implementation of these system mechanisms and demonstrate their overhead to be negligible. Furthermore, we employ a sample switching policy, AutoSwitch, to demonstrate their performance. Through traces and field measurements, we show that AutoSwitch reduces user disruptions by an order of magnitude.

The current paper establishes empirical patterns associated with mobile internet use on smartphones and explores user differences in these behaviors. We apply a naturalistic and longitudinal logs-based approach to collect real usage data from 24 iPhone users in the wild. These data are used to describe smartphone usage and analyze revisitation patterns of web browsers, native applications, and physical locations where phones are used. Among our findings are that web page revisitation through browsers occurred very infrequently (approximately 25% of URLs are revisited by each user), bookmarks were used sparingly, physical traversing patterns mirrored virtual (internet) traversing patterns and users systematically differed in their web use. We characterize these differences and suggest ways to support users with enhanced design of smartphone technologies and content.

Previous studies have found that smartphone users differ by orders of magnitude. We explore this variability to understand how users install and use native applications in ecologically-valid environments. A quasi-experimental approach is applied to compare how users in different socio-economic status (SES) groups adopt new smartphone technology along with how applications are installed and used. We present a longitudinal study of 34 iPhone 3GS users. 24 of these participants were chosen from two carefully selected SES groups who were otherwise similar and balanced. Usage data collected through an in-device programmable logger, as well as several structured interviews, identify similarities, differences, and trends, and highlight systematic differences in smartphone usage. A group of 10 lower SES participants were later recruited and confirm the influence of SES diversity on device usage. Among our findings are that a large number of applications were uninstalled, lower SES groups spent more money on applications and installed more applications overall, and the lowest SES group perceived the usability of their iPhones poorly in comparison to the other groups. We further discuss the primary reasons behind this low score, and suggest design implications to better support users across SES brackets.

The present report is an empirical analysis of smartphone personalisation. We collected data from two groups of users to measure how they adapt the content, interface and physical appearance of their devices. This user-driven personalisation is measured with a simple heuristic approach to quantify the behaviour. Using these scores, we explore how users differ from each other in how they personalise their smartphones with a focus on gender differences, usability and device usage in the wild. Among our findings are that not all users personalise their smartphones, females and males personalise their iPhones differently, and those who personalised their phones more tended to rate it as more usable. The users who personalised more also used their device for greater periods of time on a broader range of applications. For instance, individuals who adapted their iPhones to a greater degree also accessed the Web more often and spent more time browsing once it was accessed. We conclude with a discussion of possible factors underlying the large user diversity of smartphone personalisation found in this research.