1,054 research outputs found
“I Don't Know Exactly but I Know a Little”: Exploring Better Responses of Conversational Agents with Insufficient Information
No full textDespite the increasing presence of conversational agents (CAs) in our daily lives, the lack of information and technology behind them prevents CAs from answering many questions. One of the most typical problems facing conversational user interfaces today is that they often disappoint people by giving the same answer (e.g., “I don't know”). In this work, we focused on situations in which CAs do not provide a proper answer because of a lack of information. Under these situations, we aimed to find more effective answer strategies for CAs to provide people better user experiences. We tested four different response strategies using different degrees of inferences and information as ground. We found differences in usability and user experience depending on how CAs respond. Our results will help designers understand how people feel about the way CAs respond and create better CA responses in situations where it is difficult to provide accurate answers
Understanding Practical Challenges and Enablers for Embedding Environmental Perspectives in Digital Product Design and Development
No full textWould People Mumble Rap to Alexa?
Full text linkUnclear speech, like mumbling, is difficult to understand for people, and even harder for conversational user interfaces (CUI) to process. Yet, there are multiple reasons why unintelligible speech is meaningful between humans, playing a critical role in social dynamics and status signaling that evolved in humans over time allowing us to form cohesive social groups for survival. For example in modern times, humans often use such changed speech in order to make themselves understandable only by in-group members, e.g. "mumble rap", while subtly excluding out-group members. As such, we argue here that future CUIs must be attentive to how people use various forms of non-standard changed speech (e.g. mumbling, dialect, slang, inflection) to express themselves, lest CUIs be socially inept. Based on psychological, linguistic, and cross-cultural research, we point out several major challenges for researchers: 1) current CUIs typically omit non-standard speech like mumbling which are critical to human social communication, and 2) in the future humans may innately form ingroups with their personal CUIs resulting in speech behaviors meant to exclude outgroup members (both humans and machines). Both of those challenges require more research to address. Moreover, the use of changed speech for status signaling and ingroup/outgroup (IG/OG) signaling appears to be a phenomenon that varies across diverse cultures, languages, and situations, which CUI designers and engineers need to be mindful of going forward.</p
Moral Transparency as a Mitigator of Moral Bias in Conversational User Interfaces
Full text linkFrom straightforward interactions to full-fledged open-ended dialogues, Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are designed to support end-user goals and follow their requests. As CUIs become more capable, investigating how to restrict or limit their ability to carry out user requests becomes increasingly critical. Currently, such intentionally constrained user interactions are accompanied by a generic explanation (e.g., "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot say..."). We describe the role of moral bias in such user restrictions as a potential source of conflict between CUI users' autonomy and system characterisation as generated by CUI designers. Just as the users of CUIs have diverging moral viewpoints, so do CUI designers - which either intentionally or unintentionally affects how CUIs communicate. Mitigating user moral biases and making the moral viewpoints of CUI designers apparent is a critical path forward in CUI design. We describe how moral transparency in CUIs can support this goal, as exemplified through intelligent disobedience. Finally, we discuss the risks and rewards of moral transparency in CUIs and outline research opportunities to inform the design of future CUIs.</p
Diversity Equity and Inclusion in Embodied AI : Reflecting on and Re-imagining our Future with Embodied AI
Full text linkMulti-Bit Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes Using One-Bit Error Boundary
No full textThis letter proposes an efficient method to reduce path splits in the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. We construct the boundary consisting of single-bit and multi-bit nodes that have a low error probability within the SC-decoding tree. The nodes on the boundary are considered with only two candidates per path instead of descending to their child nodes. To establish the boundary, we investigate the error probability of multi-bit nodes in the SC-decoding tree. The proposed method reduces the overall decoding cycles by approximately 70% while maintaining almost the same error-correcting performance as the conventional SCL decoding method.
Misinformation in third-party voice applications
Full text linkThis paper investigates the potential for spreading misinformation via third-party voice applications in voice assistant ecosystems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Our work fills a gap in prior work on privacy issues associated with third-party voice applications, looking at security issues related to outputs from such applications rather than compromises to privacy from user inputs. We define misinformation in the context of third-party voice applications and implement an infrastructure for testing third-party voice applications using automated natural language interaction. Using our infrastructure, we identify — for the first time — several instances of misinformation in third-party voice applications currently available on the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa platforms. We then discuss the implications of our work for developing measures to pre-empt the threat of misinformation and other types of harmful content in third-party voice assistants becoming more significant in the future
Uma análise da relação entre o déficit habitacional e o programa Minha Casa Minha Vida em cinco Coredes do Rio Grande do Sul
Full text linkEste texto pretende analisar se há alguma relação entre o déficit habitacional e a contratação de unidades habitacionais do programa Minha Casa Minha Vida em alguns Conselhos Regionais de Desenvolvimento (Coredes): Metropolitano Delta do Jacuí, Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Sul, Fronteira Oeste e Vale do Rio Pardo. A partir da metodologia e da definição do que é o déficit habitacional, da Fundação João Pinheiro, construído com base nas informações do Censo de 2010, do Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), apresenta-se um perfil de tal problema no Rio Grande do Sul, levando em conta as faixas de renda das famílias nessa condição, a localização em áreas rurais e urbanas e os tipos de déficit presentes no território estadual. De certa forma, a distribuição das novas unidades habitacionais segue a configuração da concentração do déficit nos Coredes, apesar de algumas particularidades a respeito das faixas de renda e da maior presença do Programa nas áreas rurais, em alguns deles. Palavras-chave: déficit habitacional; Minha Casa Minha Vida; CoredesTÍTULO EM INGLÊSAn analysis of the relationship between the housing deficit and the program Minha Casa Minha Vida (My house, My life) in five Coredes of the State of Rio Grande do Sul AbstractThis article intends to investigate if there is any relationship between the housing deficit and the construction of housing units by the program Minha Casa Minha Vida (My house, My life) in the following Regional Development Councils (Coredes): Metropolitano Delta do Jacuí, Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Sul, Fronteira Oeste and Vale do Rio Pardo. Based on the methodology and definition of housing deficit developed by the João Pinheiro Foundation, which used information from the 2010 Census, of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the author presents a profile of this problem in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, taking into account the income rages of the families in this condition, the location in both rural and urban areas and the types of deficits found in the state’s territory. In a way, the distribution of the new housing units follows the configuration of the concentration of the deficit in the Coredes, despite some peculiarities regarding the income ranges and the greater presence of the program in the rural areas in some of them. Keywords: housing deficit; Minha Casa Minha Vida; CoredesClassificação JEL: R21; R31Artigo recebido em 07 fev. 2017.
Aprendizagem organizacional: construção e validação de instrumento de medida
Full text linkDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção.A presente pesquisa teve como objetivo principal construir e validar um instrumento destinado a medir, de acordo com as percepções dos funcionários do Banco do Brasil, a existência de características relacionadas à aprendizagem organizacional na perspectiva do processamento da informação. Teve também o propósito de descrever as dimensões em que as variáveis estudadas estão presentes na organização pesquisada e verificar, de acordo com as características pessoais e funcionais dos respondentes, se existem diferenças de percepção em relação a essas variáveis. A construção do instrumento teve como base teórica três dos quatro constructos elaborados por Huber (1991) relacionados à aprendizagem organizacional - Aquisição do Conhecimento, Distribuição da Informação e Memória Organizacional. A pesquisa, de caráter instrumental, descritivo e quantitativo, foi aplicada em uma amostra aleatória de 2.500 funcionários da organização, utilizando-se o instrumento construído, ao qual denominou-se Escala de Medida de Aprendizagem Organizacional - EMAO. Na amostra final de 903 sujeitos - após as analises exploratórias - foram realizadas análises fatoriais, obtendo-se, como resultado, um instrumento unifatorial com 69 itens relativos à aprendizagem organizacional, que demonstrou possuir validade conceitual e fatorial (carga fatorial dos itens acima de 0,40) e bom índice de precisão para fins de pesquisa (Alpha de Crombach de 0,83). As análises descritivas apontaram que as variáveis pesquisadas estão presentes na organização, mas não de forma extensa (média 3,35 em uma escala de 1 a 5 pontos) o que sinaliza que existe uma margem significativa para aumento da dimensão da aprendizagem organizacional existente. As análises inferenciais - ANOVAS e Correlações de Pearson - apontaram diferenças de percepção dos funcionários relacionadas às variáveis idade, exercício de chefia e tempo de serviço
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