Lithium–ion batteries play a crucial role in clean transportation systems including EVs, aircraft, and electric micromobilities. The design of battery cells and their production process are as important as their characterisation, monitoring, and control techniques for improved energy delivery and sustainability of the industry. In recent decades, the data-driven approaches for addressing all mentioned aspects have developed massively with promising outcomes, especially through artificial intelligence and machine learning. This paper addresses the latest developments in explainable machine learning known as XML and its application to lithium–ion batteries. It includes a critical review of the XML in the manufacturing and production phase, and then later, when the battery is in use, for its state estimation and control. The former focuses on the XML for optimising the battery structure, characteristics, and manufacturing processes, while the latter considers the monitoring aspect related to the states of health, charge, and energy. This paper, through a comprehensive review of theoretical aspects of available techniques and discussing various case studies, is an attempt to inform the stack-holders of the area about the state-of-the-art XML methods and encourage those to move from the ML to XML in transition to a NetZero future. This work has also highlighted the research gaps and potential future research directions for the battery community.

Recent advances on Social Robotics raise the question whether a social robot can be used as a persuasive agent. To date, a body of literature has been performed using various approaches to answer this research question, ranging from the use of non-verbal behavior to the exploration of different embodiment characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the role of social power for making social robots more persuasive. Social power is defined as one’s ability to influence another to do something which s/he would not do without the presence of such power. Different theories classify alternative ways to achieve social power, such as providing a reward, using coercion, or acting as an expert. In this work, we explored two types of persuasive strategies that are based on social power (specifically Reward and Expertise) and created two social robots that would employ such strategies. To examine the effectiveness of these strategies we performed a user study with 51 participants using two social robots in an adversarial setting in which both robots try to persuade the user on a concrete choice. The results show that even though each of the strategies caused the robots to be perceived differently in terms of their competence and warmth, both were similarly persuasive.

Machine learning is currently undergoing an explosion in capability, popularity, and sophistication. However, one of the major barriers to widespread acceptance of machine learning (ML) is trustworthiness: most ML models operate as black boxes, their inner workings opaque and mysterious, and it can be difficult to trust their conclusions without understanding how those conclusions are reached. Explainability is therefore a key aspect of improving trustworthiness: the ability to better understand, interpret, and anticipate the behaviour of ML models. To this end, we propose SMILE, a new method that builds on previous approaches by making use of statistical distance measures to improve explainability while remaining applicable to a wide range of input data domains.