Researcher profile

Jose Such

Jose Such contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Unweighted ranking for value-based decision making with uncertainty

As intelligent systems are increasingly implemented in our society to make autonomous decisions, their commitment to human values raises serious concerns. Their alignment with human values remains a critical challenge because it can jeopardise the integrity and security of citizens. For this reason, an innovative human-centred and values-driven approach to decision making is required. In this work, we introduce the Fuzzy-Unweighted Value-Based Decision Making (FUW-VBDM) framework, where agents incorporate both quantitative and qualitative criteria to generate human-centred decisions. We also address the normative bias introduced by stakeholders with arbitrary weights by removing prior weights and introducing a fuzzy domain of decision variables defined for a score function. This concept allows us to generalise any VBDM problem as the search for feasible solutions when optimising the score in the weight domain. To provide a solution to FUW-VBDM, we present Rankzzy, a customizable unweighted ranking method that integrates fuzzy-based reasoning to quantify uncertainty. We mathematically prove the consistency of the Rankzzy for any admissible configuration selected by stakeholders. We show the applicability of our method through an illustrative case study, which we also use as a running example. The evaluation conducted indicates a reduced computational cost in large-scale value-based decision-making problems and a strong rank performance regarding existing approaches when employing the aggregation via Pythagorean means.

preprint2023arXiv

Legal Obligation and Ethical Best Practice: Towards Meaningful Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

To improve user experience, Alexa now allows users to consent to data sharing via voice rather than directing them to the companion smartphone app. While verbal consent mechanisms for voice assistants (VAs) can increase usability, they can also undermine principles core to informed consent. We conducted a Delphi study with experts from academia, industry, and the public sector on requirements for verbal consent in VAs. Candidate requirements were drawn from the literature, regulations, and research ethics guidelines that participants rated based on their relevance to the consent process, actionability by platforms, and usability by end-users, discussing their reasoning as the study progressed. We highlight key areas of (dis)agreement between experts, deriving recommendations for regulators, skill developers, and VA platforms towards crafting meaningful verbal consent mechanisms. Key themes include approaching permissions according to the user's ability to opt-out, minimising consent decisions, and ensuring platforms follow established consent principles.

preprint2022arXiv

Can you meaningfully consent in eight seconds? Identifying Ethical Issues with Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces.

preprint2022arXiv

Consent on the Fly: Developing Ethical Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. We outline a research agenda towards usable and effective voice-based consent to address the problems with brokering consent verbally, including our own work drawing on the GDPR and work on consent in Ubicomp.

preprint2022arXiv

When It's Not Worth the Paper It's Written On: A Provocation on the Certification of Skills in the Alexa and Google Assistant Ecosystems

The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-purpose platform for tasks like playing music, accessing information, and controlling smart home devices. In order to maintain the quality of third-party skills and to protect children and other members of the public from inappropriate or malicious skills, platform providers have developed content policies and certification procedures that skills must undergo prior to public release. Unfortunately, research suggests that these measures have been ineffective at curating voice assistant platforms, with documented instances of skills with significant security and privacy problems. This provocation paper outlines how the underlying architectures of these platforms had turned skill certification into a seemingly intractable problem, as well as how current certification methods fall short of their full potential. We present a roadmap for improving the state of skill certification on contemporary voice assistant platforms, including research directions and actions that need to be taken by platform vendors. Promoting this change in domestic voice assistants is especially important, as developers of commercial and industrial assistants or other similar contexts increasingly look to these devices for norms and conventions.