Smart systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and consequently transforming our lives. The level of system autonomy plays a vital role in the development of smart systems as it profoundly affects how people and these systems interact with each other. However, to date, there are very few studies on human interaction with such systems. This article presents findings from two field studies where two different prototypes for automating energy tariff-switching were developed and evaluated in the wild. Both prototypes offer flexible autonomy by which users can shift the system's level of autonomy among three options: suggestion-only, semi-autonomy and full autonomy, whenever they like. Our findings based on thematic analysis show that flexible autonomy is a promising way to sustain users' engagement with smart systems, despite their occasional mistakes. The findings also suggest that users take responsibility for the undesired outcomes of automated actions when delegation of autonomy can be adjusted flexibly.
On the Android platform, apps make use of personal data as part of their business model, trading location, contacts, photos and more for app use. Few people are particularly aware of the permission settings or make changes to them. We hypothesize that both the difficulty in checking permission settings for all apps on a device, along with the lack of flexibility in deciding what happens to one's data, makes the perceived cost to protect one's privacy too high. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of a study that explores what happens when permission settings are more discretional at install time. We present the results of a pilot experiment, in which we ask users to negotiate which data they are happy to share, and we show that this results in higher user satisfaction than the typical take-it-or-leave-it setting. Our preliminary findings suggest negotiating consent is a powerful interaction mechanism that engages users and can enable them to strike a balance between privacy and pricing concerns.
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auctions and game theory, and applications including privacy, the smart grid, and transportation systems.
The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. AbstractInteractive autonomous systems are likely to be more involved in future energy systems to assist human users. Given this, we prototyped a future scenario in which householders are assisted in switching electricity tariffs by an agent-based interactive system. The system uses real-time electricity monitoring to instantiate a scenario where participants may have to make, or delegate to their agent (in a variety ways), tariff switching decisions given uncertainty about their own consumption. We carried out a field trial with 12 households for 6 weeks in order to study the notion of autonomy. The results show nuanced ways in which monitoring system performance and taking control is balanced in everyday practice. Our field study provides promising directions for future use of smart systems that help householders manage their energy.
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