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.

Semantics-based platform for context-aware and personalized robot interaction in the internet of robotic things

Robots are moving from well-controlled lab environments to the real world, where an increasing number of environments has been transformed into smart sensorized IoT spaces. Users will expect these robots to adapt to their preferences and needs, and even more so for social robots that engage in personal interactions. In this paper, we present declarative ontological models and a middleware platform for building services that generate interaction tasks for social robots in smart IoT environments. The platform implements a modular, data-driven workflow that allows developers of interaction services to determine the appropriate time, content and style of human-robot interaction tasks by reasoning on semantically enriched loT sensor data. The platform also abstracts the complexities of scheduling, planning and execution of these tasks, and can automatically adjust parameters to the personal profile and current context. We present motivational scenarios in three environments: a smart home, a smart office and a smart nursing home, detail the interfaces and executional paths in our platform and present a proof-of-concept implementation. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

The morphofunctional approach to emotion modelling in robotics

In this conceptual paper, we discuss two areas of research in robotics, robotic models of emotion and morphofunctional machines, and we explore the scope for potential cross-fertilization between them. We shift the focus in robot models of emotion from information-theoretic aspects of appraisal to the interactive significance of bodily dispositions. Typical emotional phenomena such as arousal and action readiness can be interpreted as morphofunctional processes, and their functionality may be replicated in robotic systems with morphologies that can be modulated for real-time adaptation. We investigate the control requirements for such systems, and present a possible bio-inspired architecture, based on the division of control between neural and endocrine systems in humans and animals. We suggest that emotional epi- sodes can be understood as emergent from the coordination of action control and action-readiness, respectively. This stress on morphology complements existing research on the information-theoretic aspects of emotion

Motivation as a Tool for Designing Lifelong Learning Robots

[Abstract] Designing robots has usually implied knowing beforehand the tasks to be carried out and in what domains. However, in the case of fully autonomous robots this is not possible. Autonomous robots need to operate in an open-ended manner, that is, deciding on the most interesting goals to achieve in domains that are not known at design time. This obviously poses a challenge from the point of view of designing the robot control structure. In particular, the main question that arises is how to endow the robot with a designer defined purpose and with means to translate that purpose into operational decisions without any knowledge of what situations the robot will find itself in. In this paper, we provide a formalization of motivation from an engineering perspective that allows for the structured design of purposeful robots. This formalization is based on a definition of the concepts of robot needs and drives, which are related through experience to the appropriate goals in specific domains. To illustrate the process, a motivational system to guide the operation of a real robot is constructed using this approach. A series of experiments carried out over it are discussed providing some insights on the design of purposeful motivated operation.This work was partially funded by the EU’s H2020 research programme (grant No 640891 DREAM), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades of Spain/FEDER (grant RTI2018-101114-B-I00), Xunta de Galicia and FEDER (grant ED431C 2017/12), and by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports through the FPU grant of Alejandro RomeroXunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/1

A society of mind approach to cognition and metacognition in a cognitive architecture

This thesis investigates the concept of mind as a control system using the "Society of Agents" metaphor. "Society of Agents" describes collective behaviours of simple and intelligent agents. "Society of Mind" is more than a collection of task-oriented and deliberative agents; it is a powerful concept for mind research and can benefit from the use of metacognition. The aim is to develop a self configurable computational model using the concept of metacognition. A six tiered SMCA (Society of Mind Cognitive Architecture) control model is designed that relies on a society of agents operating using metrics associated with the principles of artificial economics in animal cognition. This research investigates the concept of metacognition as a powerful catalyst for control, unify and self-reflection. Metacognition is used on BDI models with respect to planning, reasoning, decision making, self reflection, problem solving, learning and the general process of cognition to improve performance.One perspective on how to develop metacognition in a SMCA model is based on the differentiation between metacognitive strategies and metacomponents or metacognitive aids. Metacognitive strategies denote activities such as metacomphrension (remedial action) and metamanagement (self management) and schema training (meaning full learning over cognitive structures). Metacomponents are aids for the representation of thoughts. To develop an efficient, intelligent and optimal agent through the use of metacognition requires the design of a multiple layered control model which includes simple to complex levels of agent action and behaviours. This SMCA model has designed and implemented for six layers which includes reflexive, reactive, deliberative (BDI), learning (Q-Ieamer), metacontrol and metacognition layers