447 research outputs found

    Crowd of oz : A crowd-powered social robotics system for stress management

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    Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems. However, building a fully autonomous social robot which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor due to limitations in artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome AI’s limitations, researchers have previously introduced crowdsourcing-based teleoperation methods, which summon the crowd’s input to control a robot’s functions. However, in the context of robotics, such methods have only been used to support the object manipulation, navigational, and training tasks. It is not yet known how to leverage real-time crowdsourcing (RTC) to process complex therapeutic conversational tasks for social robotics. To fill this gap, we developed Crowd of Oz (CoZ), an open-source system that allows Softbank’s Pepper robot to support such conversational tasks. To demonstrate the potential implications of this crowd-powered approach, we investigated how effectively, crowd workers recruited in real-time can teleoperate the robot’s speech, in situations when the robot needs to act as a life coach. We systematically varied the number of workers who simultaneously handle the speech of the robot (N = 1, 2, 4, 8) and investigated the concomitant effects for enabling RTC for social robotics. Additionally, we present Pavilion, a novel and open-source algorithm for managing the workers’ queue so that a required number of workers are engaged or waiting. Based on our findings, we discuss salient parameters that such crowd-powered systems must adhere to, so as to enhance their performance in response latency and dialogue quality. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

    Tell me more! Assessing interactions with social robots from speech

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    As social robots are increasingly introduced into health interventions, one potential area where they might prove valuable is in supporting people’s psychological health through conversation. Given the importance of self-disclosure for psychological health, this study assessed the viability of using social robots for eliciting rich disclosures that identify needs and emotional states in human interaction partners. Three within-subject experiments were conducted with participants interacting with another person, a humanoid social robot, and a disembodied conversational agent (voice assistant). We performed a number of objective evaluations of disclosures to these three agents via speech content and voice analyses and also probed participants’ subjective evaluations of their disclosures to three agents. Our findings suggest that participants overall disclose more to humans than artificial agents, that agents’ embodiment influences disclosure quantity and quality, and that people are generally aware of differences in their personal disclosures to three agents studied here. Together, the findings set the stage for further investigation into the psychological underpinnings of self-disclosures to artificial agents and their potential role in eliciting disclosures as part of mental and physical health interventions

    Culture and Social Media

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    博士(文学)神戸市外国語大

    Software-based dialogue systems: Survey, taxonomy and challenges

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    The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks, the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, have brought back the attention of the community to software-based dialogue systems, generally known as conversational agents or chatbots. Nonetheless, and given the novelty of the field, a generic, context-independent overview on the current state of research of conversational agents covering all research perspectives involved is missing. Motivated by this context, this paper reports a survey of the current state of research of conversational agents through a systematic literature review of secondary studies. The conducted research is designed to develop an exhaustive perspective through a clear presentation of the aggregated knowledge published by recent literature within a variety of domains, research focuses and contexts. As a result, this research proposes a holistic taxonomy of the different dimensions involved in the conversational agents’ field, which is expected to help researchers and to lay the groundwork for future research in the field of natural language interfaces.With the support from the Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Business and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the European Social Fund. The corresponding author gratefully acknowledges the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Banco Santander for the inancial support of his predoctoral grant FPI-UPC. This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project / funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00 / AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    Social media and journalism: how twitter impacts news coverage in Kenya

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    Twitter had been extensively adopted by the public, journalists, and news organizations as a new digital tool for disseminating information. Therefore, if Twitter is considered a new and effective way of gathering information that makes up news content, an investigation on how it impacts news coverage, journalists, and newsroom practices is significant. The present study conducted said investigation and came up with findings that significantly contributed to the available information about the relationship between Twitter and news dissemination. It particularly investigated how Twitter impacts news content and coverage, journalistic routines, and newsroom practices in Kenya. This study draws its data from a review of journalists from four major media organizations in Kenya. The results suggest that Twitter has had a significant impact on both news content and coverage and journalistic routine. However, the platform was found to not have a significant impact on newsroom practices. Further explanation of the results is provided in the document

    Ethical Frames: A Qualitative Study of Networked Device Use in Two High School ELA Classrooms

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    This dissertation addresses a gap in empirical research on the way reading and writing on networked devices intervene in the social dynamics of secondary classrooms. Though many studies have investigated how networked devices shape the literacy practices and social norms of online writing spaces, few have investigated the impact of networked devices on the social norms of the classroom. At the same time, the scholarly discourse on the role of networked devices in classrooms is highly polarized, with some scholars suggesting that literacy curriculum must change to meet the demands of the 21st century (Prensky, 2001; Gee, 2017; Jenkins et al., 2009), while others argue that schools have gone too far in accommodating technology, losing something vital to the project of education in the process (Carr, 2010; Bauerlein, 2010; Turkle, 2011). Researchers who attempt a more balanced interpretation have located their studies in extra-curricular spaces (boyd, 2014; Itō, 2010) which are not subject to the peculiar social demands of the classroom (Jackson, 1968; Cuban, 1986). Drawing on interviews with 24 students and 3 teachers in two small, suburban, public high schools, this qualitative study asks how networked devices matter to students and teachers who use them daily in both personal and academic spaces. The study investigates the ways in which public and policy discourses contribute to the practices and perspectives of students and teachers as they negotiate the role of networked devices in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, developing personal norms for what constitutes acceptable uses of cell phones, tablets, and laptops and making decisions about what aspects of digital literacies belong to the ELA curriculum. Two findings arose from analysis of the data: 1) Students make deliberate choices in deciding when to read and write on networked devices during class for non-class purposes and 2) The various policy documents meant to guide technology integration and digital literacy instruction represent multiple overlapping activity systems whose goals don’t always align. The findings of this study suggest that the current body of research and policies would benefit from attending more closely to important relational dimensions of device use, including how students and use networked devices to maintain their ethical commitments through reading and writing and how policy documents implicitly position students and teachers in relation to different goals for containing or connecting the classroom network. Building on a recent turn to an examination of the ethical relations implicit in writing and programming (Duffy, 2017; Brown: 2015), this study proposes ethical frames as a conceptual vocabulary for how students decide to engage with various audience types: the self, known others, school, and society. Guided by ethical frames, students manage and maintain relationships in the coextensive visible and virtual networks in the classroom and teachers implement, reject, or adapt policies that reflect the ethical frames they believe most suited to their local contexts.PHDEnglish & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145849/1/scriba_1.pd

    Internet Dwelling, Cyborgs, and the Matrix of Modernity: An Empirical Inquiry with Critical-Hermeneutic Features

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    Amidst modernity\u27s expanding electronic social matrix, this cultural-historical inquiry explores the technological construction of human being (e.g., cyborgs) and sociality in the America Online cyberscape. A two-tiered critical-hermeneutic method enables exploration of the broad rationalizing historical narrative and the localized play of virtual discursive practices impacting human meaning construction, selfhood, and social practice. A third and fourth tier of inquiry occasions integration of psychological meanings found in research participant experiential descriptions and interviews. This four-tier interplay reveals a bodily ethic enabling participants to modify subjectifying Internet practices toward meaningful social ends. Otherwise, eclipsed interpretive bodily powers contribute to undecidability about meaning constructions and identities. Despite multiple identity solicitations, normalization of objectified and schizoid being, and panoptic e-surveillance, participants pursued genuine and personally satisfying encounters

    An Everyday Approach to Agritourism Production in Southern Ontario

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    This dissertation is a nuanced interpretation of the production of space in the context of agritourism in Southern Ontario. It uses everyday life as a theoretical framework to expand conceptualizations of tourism production by enabling a discussion of how cultural practice is central to economic activity. I use agritourism to show how, in addition to being an important economic activity, tourism production is a culturally informed process with intrinsic value concerned with home and family, and contributes to individual utility, self-worth, identity and well-being for the tourism producer. In Southern Ontario, Agritourism has grown in popularity in the past thirty years. It is well-known as an economic diversification strategy but needs to be better understood as a cultural practice involving the social relations and everyday interactions of individual life contexts. I argue that the everyday reveals the production logic of well-being that is not necessarily based on an economic mentality but on the day-to-day negotiation of the home as a private place of residence, a place of work, and a tourism attraction open to the public. The question driving this dissertation is: to what extent does the everyday reveal alternative forms of production related to agritourism that are not necessarily driven by profit but by achieving a greater sense of well-being? At the heart of the research is an intimate knowledge of the farmers experience. I investigated these experiences by way of participant observation and semi-structured conversational style interviews. In addition to completing 27 interviews with a total of 32 self-employed people involved in operating/managing/running small to medium-large, and relatively large sized agritourism operations/businesses, I visited 16 agritourism attractions as an agritourist. An everyday approach shows that emotional well-being is a success factor in the production process, which points to agritourism as more than an economic activity. Adaptation, personal growth, family bonds and legacy, emotional connections, value systems, and protecting the privacy of the home are non-economic characteristics of tourism production that are about the embodied doings of day-to-day tasks that keep the destination running in the long term by preserving the well-being of the farmer and his/her family

    Online Courtship: Interpersonal Interactions Across Borders

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