Related papers: Controlled Experimentation in Naturalistic Mobile …
Failure to accurately measure the outcomes of an experiment can lead to bias and incorrect conclusions. Online controlled experiments (aka AB tests) are increasingly being used to make decisions to improve websites as well as mobile and…
In this article we propose a set of simple principles to guide empirical practice in synthetic control studies. The proposed principles follow from formal properties of synthetic control estimators, and pertain to the nature, implications,…
A growing literature uses large language models (LLMs) as synthetic participants to generate cost-effective and nearly instantaneous responses in social science experiments. However, there is limited guidance on when such simulations…
Background. Starting from the 1960s, practitioners and researchers have looked for ways to empirically investigate new technologies such as inspecting the effectiveness of new methods, tools, or practices. With this purpose, the empirical…
A recurring problem in software development is incorrect decision making on the techniques, methods and tools to be used. Mostly, these decisions are based on developers' perceptions about them. A factor influencing people's perceptions is…
Existing AI agents typically execute multi-step tasks autonomously and only allow user confirmation at the end. During execution, users have little control, making the confirm-at-end approach brittle: a single error can cascade and force a…
Context: Search-based software testing promises to provide users with the ability to generate high-quality test cases, and hence increase product quality, with a minimal increase in the time and effort required. One result that emerged out…
Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…
Indirect experiments provide a valuable framework for estimating treatment effects in situations where conducting randomized control trials (RCTs) is impractical or unethical. Unlike RCTs, indirect experiments estimate treatment effects by…
Externally controlled trials (ECTs) are increasingly used when randomized controls are infeasible, unethical, or insufficient, including applications in rare diseases, oncology, pediatrics, and post-approval effectiveness research. Although…
Effectively measuring, understanding, and improving mobile app performance is of paramount importance for mobile app developers. Across the mobile Internet landscape, companies run online controlled experiments (A/B tests) with thousands of…
Currently, personal assistant systems, run on smartphones and use natural language interfaces. However, these systems rely mostly on the web for finding information. Mobile and wearable devices can collect an enormous amount of contextual…
Understanding pedestrian dynamics and the interaction of pedestrians with their environment is crucial to the safe and comfortable design of pedestrian facilities. Experiments offer the opportunity to explore the influence of individual…
In this article we present very intuitive, easy to follow, yet mathematically rigorous, approach to the so called data fitting process. Rather than minimizing the distance between measured and simulated data points, we prefer to find such…
To enable human oversight, agentic AI systems often provide a trace of reasoning and action steps. Designing traces to have an informative, but not overwhelming, level of detail remains a critical challenge. In three user studies on a…
Social navigation and pedestrian behavior research has shifted towards machine learning-based methods and converged on the topic of modeling inter-pedestrian interactions and pedestrian-robot interactions. For this, large-scale datasets…
Randomized controlled trials generate experimental variation that can credibly identify causal effects, but often suffer from limited scale, while observational datasets are large, but often violate desired identification assumptions. To…
A/B test, a simple type of controlled experiment, refers to the statistical procedure of experimenting to compare two treatments applied to test subjects. For example, many IT companies frequently conduct A/B tests on their users who are…
Recent advances in the development of large language models are rapidly changing how online applications function. LLM-based search tools, for instance, offer a natural language interface that can accommodate complex queries and provide…
Most existing evaluations of explainable machine learning (ML) methods rely on simplifying assumptions or proxies that do not reflect real-world use cases; the handful of more robust evaluations on real-world settings have shortcomings in…