15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
HUMAN-AUTOMATION COORDINATION MEDIATED BY RECIPROCAL SOCIALITY
Tetsuo Sawaragi
Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University
Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.

Human and computer subsystems should be structured and designed to work in mutually cooperating ways guaranteeing a user’s usability. For this purpose, progressive system redesigns are needed with respect to human computer interactions to increase system reliability and transparency by increasing human-system interactions and especially a human user’s proactive participation, rather than by eliminating the human out of the loop. Such a socially-centered view on the human-machine system design regards a human and an automated agent as equivalent partners, and through their mixed-initiative interactions some novel relations of mutual dependency and reciprocity would emerge as well as flexible changes of role-taking are expected. After surveying the problems incurred by the conventional technology-centered automation in a variety of fields, we put an emphasis on the fact that a concept of sociality is really needed to form the ideal relations of human-automation and to let them emerge out of intimate interactions.
Keywords: Interface agent, usability, human-system interactions, human-centered design, socially-centered automation
Session slot T-Fr-M06: Automation and Social Responsibility/Area code 6b : Social Impact of Automation