Gaze Contingency in Turn-Taking for Human Robot Interaction: Advantages and Drawbacks

Palinko O, Sciutti A, Schillingmann L, Rea F, Nagai Y, Sandini G. Gaze Contingency in Turn-Taking for Human Robot Interaction: Advantages and Drawbacks. Presented at the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication

"Look at Me!": Self-Interruptions as Attention Booster?

Carlmeyer B, Schlangen D, Wrede B. "Look at Me!": Self-Interruptions as Attention Booster? In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Human Agent Interaction - HAI '16. Singapore: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); 2016

Exploring self-interruptions as a strategy for regaining the attention of distracted users

Carlmeyer B, Schlangen D, Wrede B. Exploring self-interruptions as a strategy for regaining the attention of distracted users. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Embodied Interaction with Smart Environments - EISE '16. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); 2016: 1

The perception of a robot partner’s effort elicits a sense of commitment to human-robot interaction

Previous research has shown that the perception that one’s partner is investing effort in a joint action can generate a sense of commitment, leading participants to persist longer despite increasing boredom. The current research extends this finding to human-robot interaction. We implemented a 2-player version of the classic snake game which became increasingly boring over the course of each round, and operationalized commitment in terms of how long participants persisted before pressing a ‘finish’ button to conclude each round. Participants were informed that they would be linked via internet with their partner, a humanoid robot. Our results reveal that participants persisted longer when they perceived what they believed to be cues of their robot partner’s effortful contribution to the joint action. This provides evidence that the perception of a robot partner’s effort can elicit a sense of commitment to human-robot interaction

That Does Not Compute: Unpacking the Fembot in American Science Fiction.

M.A. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Anxieties and artificial women: disassembling the pop culture gynoid

2018 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis analyzes the cultural meanings of the feminine-presenting robot, or gynoid, in three popular sci-fi texts: The Stepford Wives (1975), Ex Machina (2013), and Westworld (2017). Centralizing a critical feminist rhetorical approach, this thesis outlines the symbolic meaning of gynoids as representing cultural anxieties about women and technology historically and in each case study. This thesis draws from rhetorical analyses of media, sci-fi studies, and previously articulated meanings of the gynoid in order to discern how each text interacts with the gendered and technological concerns it presents. The author assesses how the text equips—or fails to equip—the public audience with motives for addressing those concerns. Prior to analysis, each chapter synthesizes popular and scholarly criticisms of the film or series and interacts with their temporal contexts. Each chapter unearths a unique interaction with the meanings of gynoid: The Stepford Wives performs necrophilic fetishism to alleviate anxieties about the Women's Liberation Movement; Ex Machina redirects technological anxieties towards the surveilling practices of tech industries, simultaneously punishing exploitive masculine fantasies; Westworld utilizes fantasies and anxieties cyclically in order to maximize its serial potential and appeal to impulses of its viewership, ultimately prescribing a rhetorical placebo. The conclusion synthesizes each chapter topically and ruminates on real-world implications. Overall, this thesis urges critical attention toward the gynoids' role in oppressive hierarchies onscreen and in reality

Robot mediated communication: Enhancing tele-presence using an avatar

In the past few years there has been a lot of development in the field of tele-presence. These developments have caused tele-presence technologies to become easily accessible and also for the experience to be enhanced. Since tele-presence is not only used for tele-presence assisted group meetings but also in some forms of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), these activities have also been facilitated. One of the lingering issues has to do with how to properly transmit presence of non-co-located members to the rest of the group. Using current commercially available tele-presence technology it is possible to exhibit a limited level of social presence but no physical presence. In order to cater for this lack of presence a system is implemented here using tele-operated robots as avatars for remote team members and had its efficacy tested. This testing includes both the level of presence that can be exhibited by robot avatars but also how the efficacy of these robots for this task changes depending on the morphology of the robot. Using different types of robots, a humanoid robot and an industrial robot arm, as tele-presence avatars, it is found that the humanoid robot using an appropriate control system is better at exhibiting a social presence. Further, when compared to a voice only scenario, both robots proved significantly better than with only voice in terms of both cooperative task solving and social presence. These results indicate that using an appropriate control system, a humanoid robot can be better than an industrial robot in these types of tasks and the validity of aiming for a humanoid design behaving in a human-like way in order to emulate social interactions that are closer to human norms. This has implications for the design of autonomous socially interactive robot systems