Author name cluster

Jose Such

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers

1 author row

AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Decentralized Value Systems Agreements

Arturo Hernández-Sánchez
Natalia Criado
Stella Heras
Miguel Rebollo
Jose Such

One of the biggest challenges of value-based decision-making is dealing with the subjective nature of values. The relative importance of a value for a particular decision varies between individuals, and people may also have different interpretations of what aligning with a value means in a given situation. While members of a society are likely to share a set of principles or values, their value systems—that is, how they interpret these values and the relative importance they give to them—have been found to differ significantly. This work proposes a novel method for aggregating value systems, generating distinct value agreements that accommodate the inherent differences within these systems. Unlike existing work, which focuses on finding a single value agreement, the proposed approach may be more suitable for a realistic and heterogeneous society. In our solution, the agents indicate their value systems and the extent to which they are willing to concede. Then, a set of agreements is found, taking a decentralized optimization approach. Our work has been applied to identify value agreements in two real-world scenarios using data from a Participatory Value Evaluation process and a European Value Survey. These case studies illustrate the different aggregations that can be obtained with our method and compare them with those obtained using existing value system aggregation techniques. In both cases, the results showed a substantialimprovementinindividualutilitiescomparedtoexisting alternatives.

PDF

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Moral Uncertainty and the Problem of Fanaticism

Jazon Szabo
Natalia Criado
Jose Such
Sanjay Modgil

While there is universal agreement that agents ought to act ethically, there is no agreement as to what constitutes ethical behaviour. To address this problem, recent philosophical approaches to `moral uncertainty' propose aggregation of multiple ethical theories to guide agent behaviour. However, one of the foundational proposals for aggregation - Maximising Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) - has been criticised as being vulnerable to fanaticism; the problem of an ethical theory dominating agent behaviour despite low credence (confidence) in said theory. Fanaticism thus undermines the `democratic' motivation for accommodating multiple ethical perspectives. The problem of fanaticism has not yet been mathematically defined. Representing moral uncertainty as an instance of social welfare aggregation, this paper contributes to the field of moral uncertainty by 1) formalising the problem of fanaticism as a property of social welfare functionals and 2) providing non-fanatical alternatives to MEC, i.e. Highest k-trimmed Mean and Highest Median.

PDF Details DOI

IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

The Role of Perception, Acceptance, and Cognition in the Usefulness of Robot Explanations

Hana Kopecka
Jose Such
Michael Luck

It is known that when interacting with explainable autonomous systems, user characteristics are important in determining the most appropriate explanation, but understanding which user characteristics are most relevant to consider is not simple. This paper explores such characteristics and analyses how they affect the perceived usefulness of four types of explanations based on the robot's mental states. These types are belief, goal, hybrid (goal and belief) and baseline explanations. In this study, the explanations were evaluated in the context of a domestic service robot. The user characteristics considered are the perception of the robot's rationality and autonomy, the acceptance of the robot and the user's cognitive tendencies. We found differences in perceived usefulness between explanation types based on user characteristics, with hybrid explanations being the most useful.

PDF Details DOI

JAAMAS Journal 2022 Journal Article

An explainable assistant for multiuser privacy

Francesca Mosca
Jose Such

Abstract Multiuser Privacy (MP) concerns the protection of personal information in situations where such information is co-owned by multiple users. MP is particularly problematic in collaborative platforms such as online social networks (OSN). In fact, too often OSN users experience privacy violations due to conflicts generated by other users sharing content that involves them without their permission. Previous studies show that in most cases MP conflicts could be avoided, and are mainly due to the difficulty for the uploader to select appropriate sharing policies. For this reason, we present ELVIRA, the first fully explainable personal assistant that collaborates with other ELVIRA agents to identify the optimal sharing policy for a collectively owned content. An extensive evaluation of this agent through software simulations and two user studies suggests that ELVIRA, thanks to its properties of being role-agnostic, adaptive, explainable and both utility- and value-driven, would be more successful at supporting MP than other approaches presented in the literature in terms of (i) trade-off between generated utility and promotion of moral values, and (ii) users’ satisfaction of the explained recommended output.

Details DOI