Filtering by
- All Subjects: Education
- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
Currently, autonomous vehicles are being evaluated by how well they interact with humans without evaluating how well humans interact with them. Since people are not going to unanimously switch over to using autonomous vehicles, attention must be given to how well these new vehicles signal intent to human drivers from the driver’s point of view. Ineffective communication will lead to unnecessary discomfort among drivers caused by an underlying uncertainty about what an autonomous vehicle is or isn’t about to do. Recent studies suggest that humans tend to fixate on areas of higher uncertainty so scenarios that have a higher number of vehicle fixations can be reasoned to be more uncertain. We provide a framework for measuring human uncertainty and use the framework to measure the effect of empathetic vs non-empathetic agents. We used a simulated driving environment to create recorded scenarios and manipulate the autonomous vehicle to include either an empathetic or non-empathetic agent. The driving interaction is composed of two vehicles approaching an uncontrolled intersection. These scenarios were played to twelve participants while their gaze was recorded to track what the participants were fixating on. The overall intent was to provide an analytical framework as a tool for evaluating autonomous driving features; and in this case, we choose to evaluate how effective it was for vehicles to have empathetic behaviors included in the autonomous vehicle decision making. A t-test analysis of the gaze indicated that empathy did not in fact reduce uncertainty although additional testing of this hypothesis will be needed due to the small sample size.
Education has been at the forefront of many issues in Arizona over the past several years with concerns over lack of funding sparking the Red for Ed movement. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to education including a lack of visibility for how Arizona schools are performing at a legislative district level. While there are sources of information released at a school district level, many of these are limited and can become obscure to legislators when such school districts lie on the boundary between 2 different legislative districts. Moreover, much of this information is in the form of raw spreadsheets and is often fragmented between government websites and educational organizations. As such, a visualization dashboard that clearly identifies schools and their relative performance within each legislative district would be an extremely valuable tool to legislative bodies and the Arizona public. Although this dashboard and research are rough drafts of a larger concept, they would ideally increase transparency regarding public information about these districts and allow legislators to utilize the dashboard as a tool for greater understanding and more effective policymaking.