WHEN DO WE COOPERATE WITH ROBOTS?

Robotic usage is entering the world into many diverse ways, from advanced surgical areas to assistive technologies for disabled persons. Robots are increasingly designed and developed to assist humans with everyday tasks. However, they are still perceived as tools to be manipulated and controlled by humans, rather than complete and autonomous helpers. One of the main reasons can be addressed to the development of their capabilities to appear credible and trustworthy. This dissertation explores the challenge of interactions with social robots, investigating which specific situations and environments lead to an increase in trust and cooperation between humans and robots. After discussing the multifaceted concept of anthropomorphism and its key role on cooperation through literature, three open issues are faced: the lack of a clear definition of anthropomorphic contribution to robots acceptance, the lack of defined anthropomorphic boundaries that should not be crossed to maintain a satisfying interaction in HRI and the absence of a real cooperative interaction with a robotic peer. In Chapter 2, the first issue is addressed, demonstrating that robots credibility can be affected by experience and anthropomorphic stereotype activation. Chapter 3, 4, 5 and 6 are focussed in resolving the remaining two issues in parallel. By using the Economic Investment Game in four different studies, the emergence of human cooperative attitudes towards robots is demonstrated. Finally, the limits of anthropomorphism are investigated through comparisons of social human-like behaviours with machine-like static nature. Results show that the type of payoff can selectively affect trust and cooperation in HRI: in case of low payoff participants’ increase their tendency to look for the robots anthropomorphic cues, while a condition of high payoff is more suitable for machine-like agents.THRIVE, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Award No. FA9550-15-1-002

Conversations on Empathy

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

Conversations on Empathy

In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

Producing Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in a Robotic Learning Companion to Build Learner Rapport

abstract: With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between people promotes successful collaboration, motivation, and task success. Dialogue systems which can build rapport with their user may produce similar effects, personalizing interactions to create better outcomes. This dissertation focuses on how dialogue systems can build rapport utilizing acoustic-prosodic entrainment. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment occurs when individuals adapt their acoustic-prosodic features of speech, such as tone of voice or loudness, to one another over the course of a conversation. Correlated with liking and task success, a dialogue system which entrains may enhance rapport. Entrainment, however, is very challenging to model. People entrain on different features in many ways and how to design entrainment to build rapport is unclear. The first goal of this dissertation is to explore how acoustic-prosodic entrainment can be modeled to build rapport. Towards this goal, this work presents a series of studies comparing, evaluating, and iterating on the design of entrainment, motivated and informed by human-human dialogue. These models of entrainment are implemented in the dialogue system of a robotic learning companion. Learning companions are educational agents that engage students socially to increase motivation and facilitate learning. As a learning companion’s ability to be socially responsive increases, so do vital learning outcomes. A second goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of entrainment on concrete outcomes such as learning in interactions with robotic learning companions. This dissertation results in contributions both technical and theoretical. Technical contributions include a robust and modular dialogue system capable of producing prosodic entrainment and other socially-responsive behavior. One of the first systems of its kind, the results demonstrate that an entraining, social learning companion can positively build rapport and increase learning. This dissertation provides support for exploring phenomena like entrainment to enhance factors such as rapport and learning and provides a platform with which to explore these phenomena in future work.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Reasonable Creates: British Equestrianism and Epistemological Responsibility in Late Modernity

This thesis investigates the ethical work British horse riders conduct in order to know their horses well. This ethical imperative emerges out of a changing equestrian context. A broadening socio-economic demographic of equestrian participants, with an increasingly female population, moves equestrianism further away from its military and elitist heritage, and towards more 'one-horse owners' who nurture the ideal of close, companionable, 'partnerships' with their horses. At the same time, an increasing number of options for horse care and riding style instil the owner with responsibility to act as their horse's agent in choosing well. One of the things that they must choose, from a commercialist sphere of options, is how to educate themselves and their horses in order to achieve true partnership. This market is fraught with critique and debunking, reform and invention. I describe how this relates to a broader neoliberal context in which the idea of 'real connection' is highly valued and nostalgically missed. Through this ethnography, I aim to bring the anthropology of ethics and the 'animal turn' in anthropology into productive dialogue with one another. This is no easy task, since the former is concerned with the human sphere of moral conduct, while the latter has implemented a substantial challenge to anthropocentric study and advocated a recognition of life 'beyond the human'. However, I find grounds for mutual engagement in investigating the role that reflective thought plays within intersubjective equestrian dynamics. Many authors within the 'animal turn' critique the Cartesian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, human and non-human, and advocate that we should be cautious of the forms of detachment they invoke. In contrast, I argue that the 'epistemological responsibility' involved in knowing the horse well requires a complex and highly particular mastery of the dualistic distinctions, rather than a negation of them. In making this argument, I also contribute to the anthropology of ethics an example of nuanced relatedness between embodied intersubjectivity, self-critique, and knowledge evaluation. I demonstrate ethnographically that horse riders critique and cultivate a number of ethical, epistemological skills: open-mindedness, management of real and non-real registers of speech, self-awareness and self-comportment, narrative competence, accurate sensitive perception and good 'feel' for the horse. I demonstrate that highly valorised experiences of 'true connection' comprise of moments where horse and human move in such harmony that a third-person reflective stance is redundant; no interpretative work, communicative repair, or self-assessment is necessary. However these moments are rare and fleeting, because in this context, relational skill is (self)critical skill, riders continually learn to 'feel' more detail, to evaluate more critically, and to better recognise subtle signs of disengagement and miscommunication. In sum, this thesis demonstrates that 'true relatedness' is performed as precarious within this particular classed, gendered and epistemological context, and mobilises this finding to contribute to debates in the anthropology of ethics and the 'animal turn'.Privately funded (tuition fees paid by Intelligent Horsemanship)

Machine Medical Ethics

In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

Transforming Trauma

This book focuses on research developments, models, and practical applications of animal-assisted interventions for diverse populations who have experienced trauma. Physiological and psychological trauma is explored across three broad areas: 1) child maltreatment and family violence; 2) acute and post-traumatic stress, including that which is associated with military service, war, and developmental trauma; and 3) times of crisis, such as natural disasters and the ever-increasing risks associated with climate change, community violence, terrorism, and periods of personal loss and grief. Contributing authors, who include both national and international experts in the fields of human-animal connection and trauma, discuss how our relationships with animals can help build resiliency and foster healing to transform trauma and trauma response

Transforming Trauma

This book focuses on research developments, models, and practical applications of animal-assisted interventions for diverse populations who have experienced trauma. Physiological and psychological trauma is explored across three broad areas: 1) child maltreatment and family violence; 2) acute and post-traumatic stress, including that which is associated with military service, war, and developmental trauma; and 3) times of crisis, such as natural disasters and the ever-increasing risks associated with climate change, community violence, terrorism, and periods of personal loss and grief. Contributing authors, who include both national and international experts in the fields of human-animal connection and trauma, discuss how our relationships with animals can help build resiliency and foster healing to transform trauma and trauma response

Why do people own horses? The experiences of highly involved dressage horse owners in the United Kingdom

Horse ownership is simplistically defined through the possession of a horse; however, the logistics of keeping horses and using horses are evidenced as far more complex than the mere ownership of an object. Although it is understood horses and humans develop a relationship built on a mutual communication system, the horse is more the focus of the relationship than the human despite humans’ position of power as the possessor. The existing areas of research seek to describe the equestrian population, the physiology and biomechanics of the horse rider, and the culture of human-horse relationships. Missing from these, however, is the underlying motivation to own horses, because humans can access horses without ownership. This thesis uses an inductive qualitative approach to investigate the motivations for dressage horse ownership (because equestrians appear to self-segregate by competitive discipline). Twenty-one highly involved dressage horse owners ranging in age, experience, and professional affiliation with horses were interviewed. Two core themes emerged. The core theme ‘Getting Into Horses’ is composed of people’s discussions around becoming horse owners and has two motivation themes: ‘Always Wanted’ and ‘Securing the Horse’. Respectively, these comprise people’s attraction to horses and how they first became horse owners. The core theme of ‘Horse-Human Interaction’ is composed of people’s discussion regarding their interactions with the horses they own and contains two motivation themes: ‘Caregiving’ and ‘Using the Horse’. Respectively, these cover how caring for the horse is motiving and how riding and training is motivating for ownership. All the themes come together to form a novel theory of horse ownership motivation. The horse ownership theory is explained by utilising four other theories. Biophilia explains the initial attraction to horses. Self-determination theory explains how horse ownership is fulfilling of humans’ basic psychological needs of autonomy, competency, and relatedness. Attachment theory and achievement goal theory work in conjunction with self-determination theory to further explain why human-horse interactions are fulfilling of relatedness and competency needs. Horse ownership is motivated by the ability to control the decision-making regarding the horse, which becomes important as humans begin interacting with horses and experience satisfaction through their subsequent relationship with the horse. Furthermore, ownership protects the human-horse relationship because ownership provides the power to control decision-making