Averting Robot Eyes

Home robots will cause privacy harms. At the same time, they can provide beneficial services—as long as consumers trust them. This Essay evaluates potential technological solutions that could help home robots keep their promises, avert their eyes, and otherwise mitigate privacy harms. Our goals are to inform regulators of robot-related privacy harms and the available technological tools for mitigating them, and to spur technologists to employ existing tools and develop new ones by articulating principles for avoiding privacy harms. We posit that home robots will raise privacy problems of three basic types: (1) data privacy problems; (2) boundary management problems; and (3) social/relational problems. Technological design can ward off, if not fully prevent, a number of these harms. We propose five principles for home robots and privacy design: data minimization, purpose specifications, use limitations, honest anthropomorphism, and dynamic feedback and participation. We review current research into privacy-sensitive robotics, evaluating what technological solutions are feasible and where the harder problems lie. We close by contemplating legal frameworks that might encourage the implementation of such design, while also recognizing the potential costs of regulation at these early stages of the technology

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.

Are you talking to me? Improving the robustness of dialogue systems in a multi party HRI scenario by incorporating gaze direction and lip movement of attendees

Richter V, Carlmeyer B, Lier F, et al. Are you talking to me? Improving the robustness of dialogue systems in a multi party HRI scenario by incorporating gaze direction and lip movement of attendees. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Human-agent Interaction. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Human-agent Interaction. Singapore: ACM Digital Library; 2016.In this paper we present our humanoid robot “Meka”, partici- pating in a multi party human robot dialogue scenario. Active arbitration of the robot's attention based-on multi-modal stim- uli is utilised to attain persons which are outside of the robots field of view. We investigate the impact of this attention management and an addressee recognition on the robot's capability to distinguish utterances directed at it from communication between humans. Based on the results of a user study, we show that mutual gaze at the end of an utterance, as a means of yielding a turn, is a substantial cue for addressee recognition. Verification of a speaker through the detection of lip movements can be used to further increase precision. Further- more, we show that even a rather simplistic fusion of gaze and lip movement cues allows a considerable enhancement in addressee estimation, and can be altered to adapt to the requirements of a particular scenario

Interactive Audio Augmented Reality in Participatory Performance

Interactive Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) facilitates collaborative storytelling and human interaction in participatory performance. Spatial audio enhances the auditory environment and supports real-time control of media content and the experience. Nevertheless, AAR applied to interactive performance practices remains under-explored. This study examines how audio human-computer interaction can prompt and support actions, and how AAR can contribute to developing new kinds of interactions in participatory performance.This study investigates an AAR participatory performance based on the theater and performance practice by theater maker Augusto Boal. It draws from aspects of multi-player audio-only games and interactive storytelling. A user experience study of the performance shows that people are engaged with interactive content and interact and navigate within the spatial audio content using their whole body. Asymmetric audio cues, playing distinctive content for each participant, prompt verbal and non-verbal communication. The performative aspect was well-received and participants took on roles and responsibilities within their group during the experience

Artificial Intelligence: Robots, Avatars, and the Demise of the Human Mediator

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio