The significant growth in the aquaculture industry over the last few decades encourages new technological and robotic solutions to help improve the efficiency and safety of production. In sea-based farming of Atlantic salmon in Norway, Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are already being used for inspection tasks. While new methods, systems and concepts for sub-sea operations are continuously being developed, these systems generally does not take into account how their presence might impact the fish. This abstract presents an experimental study on how underwater robotic operations at fish farms in Norway can affect farmed Atlantic salmon, and how the fish behaviour changes when exposed to the robot. The abstract provides an overview of the case study, the methods of analysis, and some preliminary results.

Conversational agents are increasingly used to address emotional needs on top of information needs. One use case of increasing interest are counselling-style mental health and behaviour change interventions, with large language model (LLM)-based approaches becoming more popular. Research in this context so far has been largely system-focused, foregoing the aspect of user behaviour and the impact this can have on LLM-generated texts. To address this issue, we share a dataset containing text-based user interactions related to behaviour change with two GPT-4-based conversational agents collected in a preregistered user study. This dataset includes conversation data, user language analysis, perception measures, and user feedback for LLM-generated turns, and can offer valuable insights to inform the design of such systems based on real interactions.

The 49th Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences – commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize for economics – has been awarded to Richard H Thaler for his contributions to behavioural economics. He was a key proponent of the idea that humans do not act entirely rationally and is primarily known for his often misunderstood concept of Nudge Theory. Attributed to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness," a "Nudge" can change the behaviour or decision that a human will make. The basis of Nudge theory is to apply an understanding of predicted behaviours to shape and influence that automated process. Leveraging a variety of different strategies, such as default settings, information as an incentive and right context, companies have proven the ability to change someone's behaviour through a successful Nudge.

Mumbai-based Wellthy Therapeutics, a digital therapeutics company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and patient centric design to improve patient outcomes for all healthcare stakeholders in diabetes care, announced results from a pilot designed to evaluate the feasibility and scalability of an artificial intelligence led lifestyle intervention to improve self-management of people living with type 2 diabetes as a supporting tool to existing care in India. The results were featured via an oral presentation at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 77th Scientific Sessions, taking place at the San Diego Convention Centre in San Diego, California. The pilot results suggest that continuity of care between physician appointments for people with type 2 diabetes can be achieved with positive outcomes in a clinically significant, scalable and affordable way through this program. Participants that completed the pilot on average dropped their average blood sugar levels (HbA1c) by 0.59%. Amongst the participants that completed and dropped their HbA1c, the average drop observed was even higher at 1.04%.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises everything from self-driving cars to self-writing newspapers, but AI may be missing its greatest opportunity in healthcare, where AI-driven "conversational interfaces" hold untapped potential to influence the health and wellbeing of billions of people. Fueled by the massive popularity of messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, "conversational UI" is providing an emerging generation of chat-based digital services that may be the next thing in consumer technology. Instead of manipulating a graphical interface, users have a conversation with a chat-bot: software that is able to understand and respond to natural language inputs. The pace of technical advances combined with a shift in cultural norms is making AI conversations feel normal for increasing numbers of people. The idea of a "computer you can talk to" has captured the imagination of the computer science community, and the general public, for decades.