Arts Design & Architecture

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  • (2022) Herse, Sarita
    Thesis
    As collaborative agents are implemented within everyday environments and the workforce, user trust in these agents becomes critical to consider. Trust affects user decision making, rendering it an essential component to consider when designing for successful Human-Agent Collaboration (HAC). The purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between user trust and decision making with the overall aim of providing a trust calibration methodology to achieve the goals and optimise the outcomes of HAC. Recommender systems are used as a testbed for investigation, offering insight on human collaboration with dyadic decision domains. Four studies are conducted and include in-person, online, and simulation experiments. The first study provides evidence of a relationship between user perception of a collaborative agent and trust. Outcomes of the second study demonstrate that initial trust can be used to predict task outcome during HAC, with Signal Detection Theory (SDT) introduced as a method to interpret user decision making in-task. The third study provides evidence to suggest that the implementation of different features within a single agent's interface influences user perception and trust, subsequently impacting outcomes of HAC. Finally, a computational trust calibration methodology harnessing a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model and SDT is presented and assessed, providing an improved understanding of the mechanisms governing user trust and its relationship with decision making and collaborative task performance during HAC. The contributions from this work address important gaps within the HAC literature. The implications of the proposed methodology and its application to alternative domains are identified and discussed.

  • (2023) Si, Yafei
    Thesis
    This thesis consists of three empirical studies focusing on the health and health care utilisation of older adults using the healthy ageing framework proposed by the World Health Organization in 2015. In Essay 1, I examine the relationships between life-course factors and intrinsic capacity, a break-through and strengths-based composite measure of ageing. I find that unfavourable early-life factors directly decrease late-life intrinsic capacities, particularly cognitive, sensory and psychological capacities rather than locomotor functioning and vitality, and these effects are exacerbated by the cumulative socioeconomic inequalities over a person’s life course. In Essay 2, I employ the method of standardised patients to identify the overuse of health care, document its patterns, and quantify its financial impact on patients in primary care in China. My findings suggest that overuse is pervasive in primary care in China and leads to a significant increase in health care expenditure. The overuse in my setting seems unlikely to be attributable to physician incompetence. My findings shed light on the cost escalation of primary care in China, which is a form of medical inefficiency that should be urgently addressed. In Essay 3, I further investigate the impact of physician over-service on the quality of care provided, since physician over-service can also contribute to physicians’ learning and therefore better health care. I report new evidence that physician over-service is associated with a significant increase in physicians’ investment in learning, such as consultation length, adherence to checklists, and patient-centred communication, but no significant change in giving a correct diagnosis, correct drug prescriptions or a referral. Moreover, over-service in drugs is associated with a significant increase in physicians’ better learning and the provision of correct drugs. However, my findings imply that physician over-service does not improve the accuracy of physicians’ decisions. The higher rate of correct drug prescriptions was mainly explained by the prescription of more drugs.