Compliance is when a human positively responds to a request or a recommendation given by a system. For example, when prompted, providing your thumbprint for an automated biometric scanner at the airport or starting to watch a new TV show on a streaming service ‘we think you will love’. In trust-related research, compliance is frequently used as a behavioural measure of trust. When evaluating the compliance-trust association in experimental settings, typically, the participants agree, when asked, that they complied because they trusted the system. We developed three scenarios in instantaneous settings where compliance with an instruction delivered by a robot would typically be ascribed to trust. However, rather than asking, ‘Did you trust?’, we asked, ‘Why did you comply?’ In a thematic analysis of responses, we discovered robot design characteristics and sources not related to the design that persuade humans to comply with instructions delivered by a robot.

User studies to investigate which human traits affect a user's response to cyber security related situations are typically conducted via self-reported surveys. However, it has been observed that factors such as peer perception, socially desirable responding, and responder bias etc. frequently impact the results, which then do not necessarily reflect the actual behavior of the user when subjected to real world security incidents. To mitigate such biases, we developed PsychoRithm - a software system that presents different real-world security scenarios for the subjects and records their real-time reactions to these scenarios. This paper describes the architecture of PsychoRithm, the design choices we had to make, and the challenges we faced in the design process.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a widely used model for enterprise application integration, mainly due to the presence of accepted standards and tools required to implement web services. While the service oriented architecture provides an elegant model for interoperability, it does not define a computational model for building the endpoints of complex distributed services it exposes in a typical enterprise application. On the other hand, software agent technology provides powerful models such as the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model that allows developers to build distributed systems with enhanced reasoning capabilities. We propose a web services based communication model for inter-agent communication allowing heterogeneous agents in a multi agent system to freely collaborate. We specifically focus on goal and beliefset sharing in BDI based agents. By providing a web services based interface, we allow agents as well as non-agent based services in a distributed system to yield the benefits of agent technology. Applicability of this proposition is demonstrated by designing and implementing a prototype multi-agent system for flood forecasting.