In this paper, we study human-AI collaboration protocols, a design-oriented construct aimed at establishing and evaluating how humans and AI can collaborate in cognitive tasks. We applied this construct in two user studies involving 12 specialist radiologists (the knee MRI study) and 44 ECG readers of varying expertise (the ECG study), who evaluated 240 and 20 cases, respectively, in different collaboration configurations. We confirm the utility of AI support but find that XAI can be associated with a "white-box paradox", producing a null or detrimental effect. We also find that the order of presentation matters: AI-first protocols are associated with higher diagnostic accuracy than human-first protocols, and with higher accuracy than both humans and AI alone. Our findings identify the best conditions for AI to augment human diagnostic skills, rather than trigger dysfunctional responses and cognitive biases that can undermine decision effectiveness.

In this paper we describe a new behavioural biometric technique based on human computer interaction. We developed a system that captures the user interaction via a pointing device, and uses this behavioural information to verify the identity of an individual. Using statistical pattern recognition techniques, we developed a sequential classifier that processes user interaction, according to which the user identity is considered genuine if a predefined accuracy level is achieved, and the user is classified as an impostor otherwise. Two statistical models for the features were tested, namely Parzen density estimation and a unimodal distribution. The system was tested with different numbers of users in order to evaluate the scalability of the proposal. Experimental results show that the normal user interaction with the computer via a pointing device entails behavioural information with discriminating power, that can be explored for identity authentication.

Forest fires are still a large concern in several countries due to the social, environmental and economic damages caused. This paper aims to show the design and validation of a proposed system for the classification of smoke columns with object detection and a deep learning-based approach. This approach is able to detect smoke columns visible below or above the horizon. During the dataset labelling, the smoke object was divided into three different classes, depending on its distance to the horizon, a cloud object was also added, along with images without annotations. A comparison between the use of RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN was also performed. Using an independent test set, an F1-score around 80%, a G-mean around 80% and a detection rate around 90% were achieved by the two best models: both were trained with the dataset labelled with three different smoke classes and with augmentation; Faster R-CNNN was the model architecture, re-trained during the same iterations but following different learning rate schedules. Finally, these models were tested in 24 smoke sequences of the public HPWREN dataset, with 6.3 min as the average time elapsed from the start of the fire compared to the first detection of a smoke column.