48 research outputs found
Shared perception is different from individual perception: a new look on context dependency
Human perception is based on unconscious inference, where sensory input
integrates with prior information. This phenomenon, known as context
dependency, helps in facing the uncertainty of the external world with
predictions built upon previous experience. On the other hand, human perceptual
processes are inherently shaped by social interactions. However, how the
mechanisms of context dependency are affected is to date unknown. If using
previous experience - priors - is beneficial in individual settings, it could
represent a problem in social scenarios where other agents might not have the
same priors, causing a perceptual misalignment on the shared environment. The
present study addresses this question. We studied context dependency in an
interactive setting with a humanoid robot iCub that acted as a stimuli
demonstrator. Participants reproduced the lengths shown by the robot in two
conditions: one with iCub behaving socially and another with iCub acting as a
mechanical arm. The different behavior of the robot significantly affected the
use of prior in perception. Moreover, the social robot positively impacted
perceptual performances by enhancing accuracy and reducing participants overall
perceptual errors. Finally, the observed phenomenon has been modelled following
a Bayesian approach to deepen and explore a new concept of shared perception.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and
Developmental Systems, 202
Tuning-less Object Naming with a Foundation Model
We implement a real-time object naming system that enables learning a set of
named entities never seen. Our approach employs an existing foundation model
that we consider ready to see anything before starting. It turns seen images
into relatively small feature vectors that we associate with index to a
gradually built vocabulary without any training of fine-tuning of the model.
Our contribution is using the association mechanism known from transformers as
attention. It has features that support generalization from irrelevant
information for distinguishing the entities and potentially enable associating
with much more than indices to vocabulary. As a result, the system can work in
a one-shot manner and correctly name objects named in different contents. We
also outline implementation details of the system modules integrated by a
blackboard architecture. Finally, we investigate the system's quality, mainly
how many objects it can handle in this way.Comment: This work was funded (or co-funded) by the Horizon-Widera-2021
European Twinning project TERAIS G.A. n. 101079338 World Symposium on Digital
Intelligence for Systems and Machines (DISA2023), Kosice, September 21-22,
2023 citations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10308905 codes:
https://github.com/andylucny/whatisthis,
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10702868 7 pages, 9 figures, 0 table
Do People Change their Behavior when the Handler is next to the Robot?
It is increasingly common for people to work alongside robots in a variety of situations. When a robot is completing a task, the handler of the robot may be present. It is important to know how people interact with the robot when the handler is next to the robot. Our study focuses on whether handler’s presence can affect human’s behavior toward the robot. Our experiment targets two different scenarios (handler present and handler absent) in order to find out human’s behavior change toward the robot. Results show that in the handler present scenario, people are less willing to interact with the robot. However, when people do interact with the robot, they tend to interact with both the handler and the robot. This suggests that researchers should consider the presence of a handler when designing for human-robot interactions
Robot-Mediated interviews: A field trial with a potential real-world user
© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company. This a peer reviewed, author’s accepted manuscript. Contact John Benjamins Publishing Company permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form.In recent years the possibility of using humanoid robots to perform interviews with children has been explored in a number of studies. This paper details a study in which a potential real-world user trialled a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system with children to establish if this approach could realistically be used in a real-world context. In this study a senior educational psychologist used the humanoid robot Kaspar to interview ten primary school children about a video they had watched prior to the interview. We conducted a pre and post interview with the educational psychologist before and after using the system to establish how the system worked for him and the perceived potential for real-world applications. The educational psychologist successfully used the system to interview the children and believed that principally using a small humanoid robot to interview children could be useful in a real-world setting provided the system was developed further.Peer reviewe
From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in
generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However,
there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based
applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most
powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper
strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative
study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning
capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four
modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the
transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative
factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream
applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini
and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed
cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4
modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that
are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary
and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal
applications
Proceedings of the Workshop on Space Telerobotics, volume 1
These proceedings report the results of a workshop on space telerobotics, which was held at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, January 20-22, 1987. Sponsored by the NASA Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST), the Workshop reflected NASA's interest in developing new telerobotics technology for automating the space systems planned for the 1990s and beyond. The workshop provided a window into NASA telerobotics research, allowing leading researchers in telerobotics to exchange ideas on manipulation, control, system architectures, artificial intelligence, and machine sensing. One of the objectives was to identify important unsolved problems of current interest. The workshop consisted of surveys, tutorials, and contributed papers of both theoretical and practical interest. Several sessions were held on the themes of sensing and perception, control execution, operator interface, planning and reasoning, and system architecture
Ctrl Shift: How Crip Alt Ctrl Designers Change the Game and Reimagine Access
My journey as a disabled arts practitioner has been one of invention, hacking, and re-imagining what input systems could be. I have created my own modalities for creating work, rather than relying on commercially available options. This is a common practice within the disabled community, as individuals often modify and hack their surroundings to make them more usable. For example, ADAPT activists took sledgehammers to smash curb cuts and poured curb ramps with cement bags, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of curb cuts as a standard architectural feature. As Yergeau notes, this type of "criptastic hacking" represents a creative resistance.(Yergeau, 2012) My interfaces and art projects are a combination of science fiction world-building, technology prototyping, and experimentation with novel ways of experiencing the world that work for my ability. I have been building interactive objects for over 20 years, and my bespoke controller games are both pieces I find comfortable to play and conceptual proposals that I share with the games community to spark consideration for alternative ways of interacting with games culture.
This interdisciplinary design research herein crosses a range of disciplines, drawing inspiration from radical forms of cognitive science, games studies, feminist studies, HCI, crip technoscience, radical science fiction, disability studies, and making practices. What has emerged through studying my own practice and the practices of others during this research is a criptastic design framework for creating playful experiences.
My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that hacking and remaking the world manifests as modifications to the design process itself. I created four versions of a physical alt ctrl game and conducted a design study with disabled artists and alt ctrl game creators. The game, Bot Party, was developed through a series of public exhibitions and explored my relationship between criptastic bespoke interface design and embodied experiences of group play. Bot Party involves physical interaction among players in groups to understand my own ways of designing, while the study looks three other disabled designers to understand the ways in which their process is similar or different to my own.
By conducting this work, I aim to contribute to the larger conversation within the games studies community about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in game design. The results highlight the need for continued exploration and development in this area, specifically in design methods. The study’s findings as they relate to my own practice revealed the importance of considering a set of values and design processes in relation to disability when creating games and playful experiences. With this perspective, I propose an initial framework that outlines possible key themes for disabled game designers. Using values as a starting point for creating deeply accessible games, this framework serves as a starting point for future research into accessible game design. This framework seeks to subvert the notion that accessibility is a list of UX best practices, audio descriptions, captions, and haptic additions and moves towards embedding within game design the values and practices used by disabled designers from the outset of the creative process. Access can be a creative framework.
An important point to make is that my efforts to do a PhD resist the academic ableism limiting the participation of people who are not from a normative background. The act of creating this PhD has eaten at the edge of my ability, and the research here was often conducted in pain under extremely trying circumstances. This perspective is relevant because it often informed my design choices and thinking. Additionally, it was conducted at a university where I experienced active discrimination from members of staff who simply refused to believe in disabilities they could not see, and in one case writing down my disability was, “self-ascribed.” To work, I had to move outside the academy and seek out workshops which gave me accessible, ergonomic equipment as is discussed in the Bot Party section. This bears mentioning because it reflects on how threatening disabilities can be within academic settings and how even providing basic levels of accessibility remains a challenge for academic institutions. The above framework could benefit academia if used to redesign postgraduate academic research practices within the academy from a place of Crip-informed pedagogy. This is future work that this academic researcher hopes to explore in depth within their academic journey.
It is important to note, much of the most relevant research to this thesis around disability studies and technology has emerged in recent years and as a result, was included iteratively in the literature review. It has informed the third study and my iterative design practice as part of the journey; however, I began this work before much of the writing in the literature review existed, including the creation of Bot Party’s first iterations. Finding this scholarship and these authors has been a kinning. Kinship, according to Gavin Van Horn, “can be considered a noun…shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet…Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning.” (Horn et al., 2021) Kinning happened throughout this work and this thesis served me as a place for discovery, contemplation, and empowerment. It is my hope sections of it will serve this function for others within my community. I found kinship with other authors working in the field of disability studies and technology, particularly with Alison Kafer, who offers a critique of Donna Haraway's cyborg in her book "Feminist Queer Crip." (Kafer, 2013) Kafer's work highlights the limitations of Haraway's cyborg as a figure of empowerment for marginalized bodies and identities, and instead advocates for a crip-queer-feminist perspective on technology and embodiment. Additionally, the author has also found resonance in the work of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsh, whose work in disability studies and HCI has been instrumental in shaping this research. Specifically, their concept of "crip technoscience" has been a key framework for understanding technology creation by disabled technologists. (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) Overall, it is my hope that this thesis will serve as a generative resource for others within the community on this journey, particularly for those who are working towards a more inclusive and intersectional understanding of technology and embodiment
Promoting Phonological Awareness for Primary Grade Students through Read-Aloud Book Activities: A Teacher\u27s Guide
This project investigated phonological awareness as it relates to beginning literacy acquisition. The literature review provided a rational and guidelines for phonological awareness instruction. A manual containing a sequence of research supported activities based on read-aloud books for facilitating acquisition of phonoiogica! awareness with primary grade students was created. Many of the activities were field tested with a class of 14 kindergarten students in the last quarter of the school year