CS2125 Paper Review Form - Winter 2019

Reviewer: Zi Yi Chen

Paper Title: Can Autonomous Vehicles Be Safe and Trustworthy? Effects of Appearance and Autonomy of Unmanned Driving Systems

Author(s): Jae-Gil Lee, Ki Joon Kim, Sangwon Lee & Dong-Hee Shin

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [ ] Yes
 [X] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [X] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [ ] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [X] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [X] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [X] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [X] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

The authors of this paper realized that most research done on autonomous vehicles only focused on the technology and not on how safe and trustworthy the users feel about the technology. They think it is important for the users of autonomous vehicles feel safe using them, and they proposed three hypotheses and conducted surveys in a simulated autonomous vehicle environment to show that an anthropomorphic nmanned driving sysem is likely to lead users believe they are interacting with a genuine social actor, which lead to positive evaluation of the performance of the system by reducing uncertainty and anxiety. Their results show correlation between the test data and thair hypotheses.


8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1: Making users feel safe using autonomous vehicles may speed up the adoption of the technology
S2: The paper is well organized, provided background knowledge, and testing results to backup their hypotheses , and their rationale of how the tests were conducted and how the scores were evaluated.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1: The survey was done in South Korea only. Since they are measuring if participants feel safe, culture differences may make a difference
W2: Making users feel safe doesn't actually make the autonnomous vehicle safer. I wonder if the results are the same if participants know the statistics of safety in autonomous cars.