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“Trust In Autonomous Systems: A Conceptual Framework Based on Risk”

by

Alan Wagner

Monday, February 13
2 - 3 PM
Weber Lecture Hall 2

About the Seminar: 
Trust is often a necessary precursor for the adoption and correct use of an autonomous system, especially when use of the system entails significant risk. Airplanes, space vehicles, and missiles, the domain of Aerospace engineering, represent several of the highest risk vehicles in use. This work builds from a formal, computational, definition of trust which connects trust to risk. Formally represented, we show that trust can be computationally represented within a game theoretic paradigm. This computational representation then allows one to develop algorithms and software for reasoning about the risk and trust demanded by a situation. This work also examines the opposite side of this problem—understanding and characterizing how people interact with autonomous systems under duress during risky situations. Our results show that in high-risk emergency situations, people tend to overtrust autonomous systems, relying on them when they should not, potentially increasing the risks they face. We present results from simulation, virtual-reality, and physical experiments and discuss the ethical ramifications of creating autonomous systems that may one day be tasked with assisting humans.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Alan R. Wagner is an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and a Senior Research Associate for the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.A. degree in Psychology from Northwestern University, his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Research Institute and a member of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Wagner’s research interests focus on human-machine trust, robot and machine ethics, and space robotics. He is the is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, and has participated in the National Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has won several best paper awards, most recently receiving best journal article of 2018 award from the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems for his work on human-machine trust.