Katherine Nelson

Currently there is no easy way to rate the ease of evacuation from a building in case of fire or a shooter. Multiple tools, based on agent-based models, exist to simulate building evacuation. However, they have not been compared with human perceptual data of how easy people think it would be to evacuate from a building. This research is part of a project to establish an EASE score (Evacuation with Acceptable Simplicity in Emergencies) and validate that metric with human data. In this study, the authors asked participants to evaluate seven 2D building floor plans for ease of evacuation. There is a gap in the research on perceptions of floor plans which motivated this study’s research questions: (a) Do non-expert users agree on the ease of building evacuation? (b) What factors do viewers use to evaluate ease of evacuation?

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator video contains a vision of a sophisticated digital personal assistant, but the natural human-agent conversational dialog shown does not currently exist. To investigate why, the authors analyzed the video using three theoretical frameworks: the DiCoT framework, the HAT Game Analysis framework, and the Flows of Power framework. These were used to codify the human-agent interactions and classify the agent's capabilities. While some barriers to creating such agents are technological, other barriers arise from privacy, social and situational factors, trust, and the financial business case. The social roles and asymmetric interactions of the human and agent are discussed in the broader context of HAT research, along with the need for a new term for these agents that does not rely on a human social relationship metaphor. This research offers designers of conversational agents a research roadmap to build more highly capable and trusted non-human teammates.