Transfer Scenarios: Grounding Innovation with Marginal Practices

Transfer scenarios is a method developed to support the design of innovative interactive technology. Such a method should help the designer to come up with inventive ideas, and at the same time provide grounding in real human needs. In transfer scenarios, we use marginal practices to encourage a changed mindset throughout the design process. A marginal practice consists of individuals who share an activity that they find meaningful. We regard these individuals not as end-users, but as valuable input in the design process. We applied this method when designing novel applications for autonomous embodied agents, e.g. robots. Owners of unusual pets, such as snakes and spiders, were interviewed - not with the intention to design robot pets, but to determine underlying needs and interests of their practice. The results were then used to design a set of applications for more general users, including a dynamic living-room wall and a set of communicating hobby robots

Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity in AI Linguistics

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female stereotypes as they fulfill emotional labor and perform pink-collar tasks, whether through roles as therapists, query-fillers, or companions. This paper examines four specific chat-based AI --ELIZA, XiaoIce, Sophia, and Erica-- and examines how their feminine linguistic patterns are used to maintain the illusion of emotional understanding in regards to the tasks that they perform. Overall, chat-based AI fails to subvert gender roles, as feminine AI are relegated to the realm of emotional intelligence and labor

Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

A socially assistive robot for people with motor impairments

We present a control architecture for nonverbal HRI that allows an anthropomorphic assistant robot with a pro-active and anticipatory behaviour. The control architecture coordinates action and goal coordination between a motor impaired human and the robot as a dynamic process that combines contextual cues, shared task knowledge, and predicted outcomes of the human behaviour. The control architecture is formalized through a coupled system of dynamic neural fields, representing a distributed network of local but connected neural populations with specific functionalities. Each subpopulation encodes relevant information about action means, goals, and context as self-sustained activation patterns. These patterns are triggered by the input and evolve continuously in time under the influence of recurrent interactions. The architecture is validated in an assistive task where the robot acts as an assistant of a person with motor impairments. We show that the context dependent mapping from action observation onto appropriate complementary actions allows the robot to cope with dynamically changing situations. This includes adaptation to different users and mutual compensation of physical limitations

A dynamic neural field architecture for a pro-active assistant robot

We present a control architecture for non-verbal HRI that allows an assistant robot to have a pro-active and anticipatory behavior. The architecture implements the coordination of actions and goals among the human, that needs help, and the robot as a dynamic process that integrates contextual cues, shared task knowledge and predicted outcome of the human motor behavior. The robot control architecture is formalized by a coupled system of dynamic neural fields representing a distributed network of local but connected neural populations with specific functionalities. Different subpopulations encode task relevant information about action means, action goals and context in form of self-sustained activation patterns. These patterns are triggered by input from connected populations and evolve continuously in time under the influence of recurrent interactions. The dynamic control architecture is validated in an assistive task in which an anthropomorphic robot acts as a personal assistant of a person with motor impairments. We show that the context dependent mapping from action observation onto appropriate complementary actions allows the robot to cope with dynamically changing situations. This includes adaptation to different users and mutual compensation of physical limitations.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - POCI/V.5/A0119/2005fp6-IST2 EU-project JAST (proj.nr. 003747

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction