This work was presented at HAIDM 2014. The 2014 workshop on Human-Agent Interaction Design and Models was co-organised by SmartSociety.

Abstract: Recently, many algorithms have been developed for autonomous agents to manage home energy use on behalf of their human owners. By so doing, it is expected that agents will be more efficient at, for example, choosing the best energy tariff to switch to when dynamically priced tariffs come about. However, to date, there has been no validation of such technologies in any field trial. In particular, it has not been shown whether users prefer fully autonomous agents as opposed to controlling their preferences manually. Hence, in this paper we describe a novel platform, called TariffAgent, to study notions of flexible autonomy in the context of tariff switching. TariffAgent uses real-world datasets and real-time electricity monitoring to instantiate a scenario where human participants may have to make, or delegate to their agent (in different ways), tariff switching decisions given uncertainties about their own consumption and tariff prices. We carried out a field trial with 10 participants and, from both quantitative and qualitative results, formulate novel design guidelines for systems that implement flexible autonomy.

Keywords: Human-Agent Interaction, Autonomous Agents, Flexible Autonomy, Energy, Smart Grid.

Citation: Alper Alan, Enrico Costanza, Joel Fisher, Sarvapali Ramchurn, Tom Rodden and Nicholas Jennings. A Field Study of Human-Agent Interaction for Electricity Tariff Switching.

Download: http://bit.ly/1MBoStF

This work was presented at HAIDM 2015. The 2015 workshop on Human-Agent Interaction Design and Models was co-organised by SmartSociety.

Abstract: Interactive agent-based systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, helping people in many domains including healthcare, transportation, and energy. As such, there is a need to investigate how humans and agents interact with each other to maximize the benefit that such systems can offer. In this paper, we present a field study that lasted for six weeks, in which 12 different households were required to interact on a daily basis with an agent-based system in order to manage their electricity pricing scheme. The main goal of this study was to explore long term interactions between human users and an agent to understand how people’s trust towards an agent may change over time, and consequently affect their autonomy and interaction preferences. Our results suggest that flexible autonomy shows promise for sustaining users’ trust and engagement with an agent, despite its occasional mistakes.

Keywords: Human-Agent Interaction, Autonomous Agents, Flexible Autonomy, Energy.

Citation: Alper Alan, Enrico Costanza, Sarvapali Ramchurn, Joel Fischer, Tom Rodden and Nicholas Jennings. Evaluating Human-Agent Interaction in the Wild.

Download: http://bit.ly/1S8bZri