The recent vaccine-related infodemic has amplified public concerns, highlighting the need for proactive misinformation management. We describe how we enhanced the reporting surveillance system of Victoria's vaccine safety service, SAEFVIC, through the incorporation of new information sources for public sentiment analysis, topics of discussion, and hesitancies about vaccinations online. Using VaxPulse, a multi-step framework, we integrate adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) with sentiment analysis, demonstrating the importance of contextualising public concerns. Additionally, we emphasise the need to address non-English languages to stratify concerns across ethno-lingual communities, providing valuable insights for vaccine uptake strategies and combating mis/disinformation. The framework is applied to real-world examples and a case study on women's vaccine hesitancy, showcasing its benefits and adaptability by identifying public opinion from online media.

-- Successful human-robot collaboration depends on cohesive communication and a precise understanding of the robot's abilities, goals, and constraints. While robotic manipulators offer high precision, versatility, and productivity, they exhibit expressionless and monotonous motions that conceal the robot's intention, resulting in a lack of efficiency and transparency with humans. In this work, we use Laban notation, a dance annotation language, to enable robotic manipulators to generate trajectories with functional expressivity, where the robot uses nonverbal cues to communicate its abilities and the likelihood of succeeding at its task. We achieve this by introducing two novel variants of Hesitant expressive motion (Spoke-Like and Arc-Like). We also enhance the emotional expressivity of four existing emotive trajectories (Happy, Sad, Shy, and Angry) by augmenting Laban Effort usage with Laban Shape. The functionally expressive motions are validated via a human-subjects study, where participants equate both variants of Hesitant motion with reduced robot competency. The enhanced emotive trajectories are shown to be viewed as distinct emotions using the V alence-Arousal-Dominance (V AD) spectrum, corroborating the usage of Laban Shape. I. INTRODUCTION With the growing popularity of robots and their increased deployment in the real world, it has become increasingly important to ensure their successful collaboration with humans. Effective human-robot collaboration relies on clear communication and an accurate understanding of the robot's mental model, which refers to the humans' understanding of the robots' capabilities, intentions, and limitations [37].

Generative agents have been increasingly used to simulate human behaviour in silico, driven by large language models (LLMs). These simulacra serve as sandboxes for studying human behaviour without compromising privacy or safety. However, it remains unclear whether such agents can truly represent real individuals. This work compares survey data from the Understanding America Study (UAS) on healthcare decision-making with simulated responses from generative agents. Using demographic-based prompt engineering, we create digital twins of survey respondents and analyse how well different LLMs reproduce real-world behaviours. Our findings show that some LLMs fail to reflect realistic decision-making, such as predicting universal vaccine acceptance. However, Llama 3 captures variations across race and Income more accurately but also introduces biases not present in the UAS data. This study highlights the potential of generative agents for behavioural research while underscoring the risks of bias from both LLMs and prompting strategies.

Can we simulate a sandbox society with generative agents to model human behavior, thereby reducing the over-reliance on real human trials for assessing public policies? In this work, we investigate the feasibility of simulating health-related decision-making, using vaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services (MacDonald, 2015), as a case study. To this end, we introduce the VacSim framework with 100 generative agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). VacSim simulates vaccine policy outcomes with the following steps: 1) instantiate a population of agents with demographics based on census data; 2) connect the agents via a social network and model vaccine attitudes as a function of social dynamics and disease-related information; 3) design and evaluate various public health interventions aimed at mitigating vaccine hesitancy. To align with real-world results, we also introduce simulation warmup and attitude modulation to adjust agents' attitudes. We propose a series of evaluations to assess the reliability of various LLM simulations. Experiments indicate that models like Llama and Qwen can simulate aspects of human behavior but also highlight real-world alignment challenges, such as inconsistent responses with demographic profiles. This early exploration of LLM-driven simulations is not meant to serve as definitive policy guidance; instead, it serves as a call for action to examine social simulation for policy development.

The interpretability of machine learning models is critical, as users may be reluctant to rely on their inferences. Intuitionistic FCMs (iFCMs) have been proposed as an extension of FCMs offering a natural mechanism to assess the quality of their output through the estimation of hesitancy, a concept resembling to human hesitation in decision making. To address the challenge of interpretable image classification, this paper introduces a novel framework, named Interpretable Intuitionistic FCM (I2FCM) which is domain-independent, simple to implement, and can be applied on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, rendering them interpretable. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time iFCMs are applied for image classification. Further novel contributions include: a feature extraction process focusing on the most informative image regions; a learning algorithm for data-driven determination of the intuitionistic fuzzy interconnections of the iFCM; an inherently interpretable classification approach based on image contents. In the context of image classification, hesitancy is considered as a degree of inconfidence with which an image is categorized to a class. The constructed iFCM model distinguishes the most representative image semantics and analyses them utilizing cause-and-effect relations. The effectiveness of the introduced framework is evaluated on publicly available datasets, and the experimental results confirm that it can provide enhanced classification performance, while providing interpretable inferences.

Vaccination is important to minimize the risk and spread of various diseases. In recent years, vaccination has been a key step in countering the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many people are skeptical about the use of vaccines for various reasons, including the politics involved, the potential side effects of vaccines, etc. The goal in this task is to build an effective multi-label classifier to label a social media post (particularly, a tweet) according to the specific concern(s) towards vaccines as expressed by the author of the post. We tried three different models-(a) Supervised BERT-large-uncased, (b) Supervised HateXplain model, and (c) Zero-Shot GPT-3.5 Turbo model. The Supervised BERT-large-uncased model performed best in our case. We achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.66, a Jaccard similarity score of 0.66, and received the sixth rank among other submissions.

Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite the government's information campaigns and the efforts of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Categorising the topics within vaccine-related narratives is crucial to understand the concerns expressed in discussions and identify the specific issues that contribute to vaccine hesitancy. This paper addresses the need for monitoring and analysing vaccine narratives online by introducing a novel vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.

Vaccine hesitancy has been a common concern, probably since vaccines were created and, with the popularisation of social media, people started to express their concerns about vaccines online alongside those posting pro- and anti-vaccine content. Predictably, since the first mentions of a COVID-19 vaccine, social media users posted about their fears and concerns or about their support and belief into the effectiveness of these rapidly developing vaccines. Identifying and understanding the reasons behind public hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccines is important for policy markers that need to develop actions to better inform the population with the aim of increasing vaccine take-up. In the case of COVID-19, where the fast development of the vaccines was mirrored closely by growth in anti-vaxx disinformation, automatic means of detecting citizen attitudes towards vaccination became necessary. This is an important computational social sciences task that requires data analysis in order to gain in-depth understanding of the phenomena at hand. Annotated data is also necessary for training data-driven models for more nuanced analysis of attitudes towards vaccination. To this end, we created a new collection of over 3,101 tweets annotated with users' attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination (stance). Besides, we also develop a domain-specific language model (VaxxBERT) that achieves the best predictive performance (73.0 accuracy and 69.3 F1-score) as compared to a robust set of baselines. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first dataset and model that model vaccine hesitancy as a category distinct from pro- and anti-vaccine stance.

Understanding the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as who and why, is very crucial since a large-scale vaccine adoption remains as one of the most efficient methods of controlling the pandemic. Such an understanding also provides insights into designing successful vaccination campaigns for future pandemics. Unfortunately, there are many factors involving in deciding whether to take the vaccine, especially from the cultural point of view. To obtain these goals, we design a novel culture-aware machine learning (ML) model, based on our new data collection, for predicting vaccination willingness. We further analyze the most important features which contribute to the ML model's predictions using advanced AI explainers such as the Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). These analyses reveal the key factors that most likely impact the vaccine adoption decisions. Our findings show that Hispanic and African American are most likely impacted by cultural characteristics such as religions and ethnic affiliation, whereas the vaccine trust and approval influence the Asian communities the most. Our results also show that cultural characteristics, rumors, and political affiliation are associated with increased vaccine rejection.

Ranking intuitionistic fuzzy sets with distance based ranking methods requires to calculate the distance between intuitionistic fuzzy set and a reference point which is known to have either maximum (positive ideal solution) or minimum (negative ideal solution) value. These group of approaches assume that as the distance of an intuitionistic fuzzy set to the reference point is decreases, the similarity of intuitionistic fuzzy set with that point increases. This is a misconception because an intuitionistic fuzzy set which has the shortest distance to positive ideal solution does not have to be the furthest from negative ideal solution for all circumstances when the distance function is nonlinear. This paper gives a mathematical proof of why this assumption is not valid for any of the non-linear distance functions and suggests a hypervolume based ranking approach as an alternative to distance based ranking. In addition, the suggested ranking approach is extended as a new multicriteria decision making method, HyperVolume based ASsessment (HVAS). HVAS is applied for multicriteria assessment of Turkey's energy alternatives. Results are compared with three well known distance based multicriteria decision making methods (TOPSIS, VIKOR, and CODAS).