CS2125 Paper Review Form - Winter 2019

Reviewer: Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat

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

Author(s):

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

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [✓] 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)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

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

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

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [✓] 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)

This paper presents its findings from a psychological study to understand users’ perception and evaluation of trust, safety, and intelligence of an autonomous driving agent. To do so, authors conducted a controlled study in a lab environment, where they provided anthropomorphic cues in four sets of appearances to an artificial driving agent and analyzed users’ experiences of interacting with them. The result shows that the feeling of social presence—induced by a humanoid robot—increases the users’ feeling of trust and safety of the autonomous agent.

While there is a good balance between male and female participants, the age range was not diverse. As most of the participants are recruited from a university and all of them are students, there should be a psychological similarity in them. Different age groups could have brought more confidence in the result. At the beginning of the study, the participants are informed that they will be interacting with an artificial driving agent. Despite knowing that, I would be skeptical about users’ feeling of social presence to some extent. Nevertheless, I don’t have any better method to offer. Otherwise, the method was nicely laid out with a strong theoretical grounding for designing measurement items and analyzing the result.


The paper is a great resource both for HCI and autonomous vehicle communities to reflect on the psychological and human factors.
 

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

S1. This paper has a strong theoretical ground for it’s question.
S2. The items of measurement are well thought and informed by literature.
s3. The results are well articulated with implications for both HCI and autonomous vehicle research communities.

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

W1. The age group of participants are not diverse. It limits paper’s generalizability.
W2. Humanoid robot—which looks like a toy—is not the best tool for the condition that creates human-like experience.