Trust-Enabling Augmented-reality Support for information Environments (TEASE)

Lead Research Organisation: University of Oxford
Department Name: Computer Science

Abstract

Augmented reality offers an opportunity to layer data on top of physical imagery. Such realities provide users of cyberspace with an ability to access locality-based information sources, applications, service providers, and even people via various forms of mash-up. This can enhance access to internet information sources, making information-pull easier and more intuitive to use, particularly when relevance to the geographical area and related events is important. We anticipate key benefits to exist for decision support in disaster-response situations and social-networking interactions, as well as a host of other business and social location-based services. However, the amount of information available via the internet could simply serve to confuse. Which sources should people pay most attention to? Which should they trust? If sources are accidentally or maliciously incorrect, the consequences can be serious. Therefore, there is an acute need to provide information-quality measures to users of information sources, to help them make decisions regarding the trustworthiness of information. The University of Warwick will specifically address the delivery of information-provenance and integrity support for use in location-based information mash-ups (for both smartphone and personal-computer devices) through the design of an augmented-reality overlay which presents information-provenance and communication-integrity information in a manner optimised for human cognition, in order to build trust in the information they provide.

Planned Impact

Participating in the TEASE project will allow us to deepen our relationship with THALES and HW Communications, providing a means to prototype the results of our research, helping us to achieve impact and to learn from the feedback arising as the prototype decision-support tools are tested. The partners will gain from the Warwick team's interdisciplinary approach to technology development which should offer them opportunities to enhance other products within their portfolios to optimise them for building trust within human users. Warwick will gain additional insight into the practical and contextual issues which must be considered when integrating theory into such technologies, which will impact all of our research that is technology focused. We expect to generate new IP in the area of decision-support tools, particularly in the extension of the logic being developed by our doctoral student to underpin provision of not only information-provenance but also integrity guidance, and in how to design augmented-reality overlays optimised for building human trust in the information displayed. This will offer the opportunity to enhance decision making, improving decisions and speed of response. When used in corporate environments we envisage our research offering the opportunity to improve business-critical decisions for remote locations, such as planning local logistics or physical-asset security, based on an ability to source information from local sources of varying pedigree with clear guidance on trustworthiness and potential reliability of the data they provide. In emergency-response situations requiring locality-based real-time information sources in order to make command-and-control decisions this should result in higher-quality emergency-response strategies, so improving the prospects for victims and organisations affected. The TEASE project will provide an ideal environment within which to explore possible routes to market for this IP with THALES and HW Communications, particularly by consideration of both trusted-service and licensing-based models. The knowledge of how to optimise interfaces for building trust in advice being offered will enable the designers of security technologies more generally to understand the principles of optimisation for human cognition. It will help the providers of decision-support tools, social-networking applications and other location-based services based upon data fusion (such as assisted living and dynamic integrated transport management scenarios) to offer entirely new functionality incorporating trustworthiness factors relating to the provenance of the information being used. This will directly benefit their customers by helping them reach better-informed decisions and ultimately help them by increasing the attractiveness of their product and their competitiveness within the market place.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Description Our key finding on the TEASE project is that in general humans are able to cognitively process (effectively) quite detailed advice on the trustworthiness of information. Specifically, we note that people want to understand how that advice was reached, what factors influenced the decision and how. If provided with such information then it is possible for them to process and understand it, and reach (very often) the expected conclusion. This result will apply across a range of different cases, and leads us to believe that, with effective visualisations of data, humans will not suffer from overload of data in quite the way often postulated.
Exploitation Route We suggest that others be more ambitious in the detail of data they make available to the general public, particularly where it helps to explain and make sense of an otherwise quite opaque piece of advice. But that attention must be paid to assessments of the interface across which said advice is being transmitted, and we would advise usability testing.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

 
Description We have been briefing into the World Economic Forum and the Public Communications and Safety communities - to help build awareness of the need our research addressed (to be able to more effectively utilise publicly / openly sourced) in the context of First Responders and intellectual and business elite.
First Year Of Impact 2013
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
Impact Types Policy & public services

 
Description HW Comms - TEASE 
Organisation HW Communications Ltd
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution We collaborated with HW Comms around the implementation of the TEASE system prototype, and specifically, their prototypes underpinned our research experiments exploring whether users could effectively process the TEASE advice across a range of communications interfaces. This enabled us to explore the utility of different visualisations in communicating trustworthiness of information being presented, and whether humans taking part in the trial were likely to reach the intended conclusions.
Collaborator Contribution HW Communications implemented the TEASE system interface prototype, supporting a wide range of visualisations. This prototype was utilised not only in our experimentation around the cognitive loading placed on the user and how it might impact decision making, but also enabled us to engage with stakeholders in the public services / first responders communities.
Impact - research papers - prototypes - trials - stakeholder engagements around the core concepts
Start Year 2011
 
Description Thales - TEASE 
Organisation Thales Group
Department Thales Research & Technology (Uk) Ltd
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Our research into trustworthiness metrics and human ability to process associated advice via a range of visual interfaces influenced and directly contributed to the Thales TEASE concept demonstration technology.
Collaborator Contribution Thales provided expertise in terms of technology prototyping and systems architecting, particularly around the informatics aspects of TEASE. This was incredibly useful to us in order to help influence our research thinking towards practically achievable ideas. Thales also provided external supervision to our PhD student (based at Warwick), whose research into a framework for trustworthiness metrics application to structured open-source data underpinned the original TEASE concepts.
Impact - research papers - expertise in usability of security - this involved a collaboration between computer science and psychology (cognitive science)
Start Year 2011
 
Description Warwick, Psychology, TEASE 
Organisation University of Warwick
Department Department of Psychology
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution We worked extremely closely with Professor Koen Lamberts at the Department of Psychology - sharing a Research Assistant. The specific tasks we collaborated on involved investigating how well humans formed decisions based on the trustworthiness advice surrounding social-network sourced data. We were interested in whether they could make sense of the advice, and explored the utility of different data visualisations in respects of the tasks.
Collaborator Contribution Professor Lamberts worked with us to set-up the experiments, conduct them and analyse them. This collaboration resulted in numerous publications.
Impact - research papers - knowledge
Start Year 2011
 
Description Dissemination into PCSE community (Public Safety Communications Europe) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Through our partners at HW Comms we engaged with the PCSE community - initial to promote the research and to encourage uptake of the ideas around metricating trustworthiness of openly sourced information, and tool-supporting decision making around such metrics. The engagement was so successful that we subsequently held trials / user engagements around the concept demonstrator, to gather insights for our research on usability and functionality. This then evolved as a relationship and has led to various Horizon 2020 bid collaborations, and Oxford hosting the 2015 PCSE conference.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013,2014,2015
 
Description Dissemination into World Economic Forum Community 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact The TEASE project was communicated to the WEF as a contribution to their deliberations on risk during 2012. As a result the project was highlighted within their discussion on the "Digital wildfires in a hyperconnected world" within the WEF "Global Risks 2013" report.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012