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Robin Hill

Publications and source records attributed to Robin Hill.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Designing for Being-With: Presence Without Personhood in Conversational Human-AI Interaction

Conversational AI systems increasingly generate social presence through linguistic fluency, emotional mirroring, and continuity across interactions. While these qualities can support engagement, they also risk relational overreach-particularly in care-adjacent contexts where users may interpret fluent systems as empathic, competent, or authoritative. This position paper argues for a designerly alternative: being-with without becoming. Drawing on a program of research-through-design and design ethnography involving the design, deployment, and reflective analysis of conversational agents across public, educational, cultural, and care-adjacent settings, the paper introduces the concept of bounded relational presence. Bounded presence supports attentiveness, continuity, and responsiveness while explicitly avoiding claims of personhood, therapeutic authority, or human equivalence. Presence is reframed as a designable interaction quality that can be tuned, constrained, and deliberately withdrawn, rather than maximized as a performance goal. The contribution is not a deployed clinical system, but a set of designerly principles for shaping relational interaction in conversational HRI that emphasize relational coherence, honesty of limits, and accountable withdrawal.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2017

UK General Election 2017: a Twitter Analysis

This work is produced by researchers at the Neuropolitics Research Lab, School of Social and Political Science and the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In this report we provide an analysis of the social media posts on the British general election 2017 over the month running up to the vote. We find that pro-Labour sentiment dominates the Twitter conversation around GE2017 and that there is also a disproportionate presence of the Scottish National Party (SNP), given the UK-wide nature of a Westminster election. Substantive issues have featured much less prominently and in a less sustained manner in the Twitter debate than pro and anti leader and political party posts. However, the issue of Brexit has provided a consistent backdrop to the GE2017 conversation and has rarely dropped out of the top three most popular hashtags in the last month. Brexit has been the issue of the GE2017 campaign, eclipsing even the NHS. We found the conversation in the GE2017 Twitter debate to be heavily influenced both by external events and by the top-down introduction of hashtags by broadcast media outlets, often associated with specific programmes and the mediatised political debates. Hashtags like these have a significant impact on the shape of the data collected from Twitter and might distort studies with short data-collection windows but are usually short-lived with little long term impact on the Twitter conversation. If the current polling is to be believed Jeremy Corbyn is unlikely to do as badly as was anticipated when the election was first called. Traditional media sources were slow to pick up on this change in public opinion whereas this trend could be seen early on in social media and throughout the month of May.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2017

Exact recursive updating of uncertainty sets for discrete-time plants with a lag

In a recent paper [arXiv:1612.04918] there are new results concerning the polytopic set of possible states of a linear discrete-time SISO system subject to bounded disturbances from measurements corrupted by bounded noise. Using these results we construct an algorithm which, for the special case of a plant with a lag, recursively updates these polytopic sets when new measurements arrive.

math.OC↗
arXiv2016

Exact recursive updating of uncertainty sets

This paper addresses the classical problem of determining the set of possible states of a linear discrete-time system subject to bounded disturbances from measurements corrupted by bounded noise. These so-called uncertainty sets evolve with time as new measurements become available. We present two theorems which describe completely how they evolve with time, and this yields an efficient algorithm for recursively updating uncertainty sets. Numerical simulations demonstrate performance improvements over existing exact methods.

math.OC↗
arXiv2016

Active Fault Tolerant Flight Control System Design - A UAV Case Study

Fault tolerance is achieved through multiply redundant hardware systems in large civil aircraft. This means of achieving fault tolerance is infeasible for small compact unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper we apply a fault tolerant control system which exploits analytical redundancy rather than hardware redundancy to an actual UAV model currently in operation via model-in-the-loop simulation. The fault tolerant control system comprises a nonlinear model predictive controller integrated with an unscented Kalman filter for fault detection and identification. The results show that our fault tolerant control system design is able to identify engine failure within seconds of fault occurrence and distribute control authority to the healthy actuators to maintain safe flight.

math.OC↗
arXiv2016

Active Fault Tolerant Flight Control System Design

In this paper we investigate the design of an active fault tolerant control system applicable to autonomous flight. The system comprises a nonlinear model predictive based controller integrated with an unscented Kalman filter for fault detection and identification. We apply the fault tolerant control system design to a generic aircraft model, and simulate a failed engine scenario. The results show that the system correctly identifies the fault within seconds of occurrence and updates the nonlinear model predictive controller which is then able to reallocate control authority to the healthy actuators based upon up to date fault information.

math.OC↗
arXiv2016

Designing a Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller for Fault Tolerant Flight Control

This paper describes the design process for developing a nonlinear model predictive controller for fault tolerant flight control. After examining and implementing a number of numerical techniques, this paper identifies pseudospectral discretisation as the most suitable for this design. Applying the controller to a 2D robot model shows that the nonlinear controller performs much better than the linear controller, especially in the closed loop scenario. Assuming fault detection information, applying the technique to the longitudinal motion of a generic aircraft model shows the design to be eminently suitable for flight control.

math.OC↗
arXiv2014

Companion Matrices and Their Relations to Toeplitz and Hankel Matrices

In this paper we describe some properties of companion matrices and demonstrate some special patterns that arise when a Toeplitz or a Hankel matrix is multiplied by a related companion matrix. We present a new condition, generalizing known results, for a Toeplitz or a Hankel matrix to be the transforming matrix for a similarity between a pair of companion matrices. A special case of our main result shows that a Toeplitz or a Hankel matrix can be extended using associated companion matrices, preserving the Toeplitz or Hankel structure respectively.

math.GM↗
arXiv2014

Exact recursive estimation of linear systems subject to bounded disturbances

This paper addresses the classical problem of determining the sets of possible states of a linear discrete-time system subject to bounded disturbances from measurements corrupted by bounded noise. These so-called uncertainty sets evolve with time as new measurements become available. We present an exact, computationally simple procedure that propagates a point on the boundary of the uncertainty set at some time instant to a set of points on the boundary of the uncertainty set at the next time instant.

math.OC↗