People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimension to Privacy and Technology Scholarship

This article updates the traditional discussion of privacy and technology, focused since the days of Warren and Brandeis on the capacity of technology to manipulate information. It proposes a novel dimension to the impact of anthropomorphic or social design on privacy. Technologies designed to imitate people-through voice, animation, and natural language-are increasingly commonplace, showing up in our cars, computers, phones, and homes. A rich literature in communications and psychology suggests that we are hardwired to react to such technology as though a person were actually present. Social interfaces accordingly capture our attention, improve interactivity, and can free up our hands for other tasks. At the same time, technologies that imitate people have the potential to implicate long-standing privacy values. One of the well-documented effects on users of interfaces and devices that emulate people is the sensation of being observed and evaluated. Their presence can alter our attitude, behavior, and physiological state. Widespread adoption of such technology may accordingly lessen opportunities for solitude and chill curiosity and self-development. These effects are all the more dangerous in that they cannot be addressed through traditional privacy protections such as encryption or anonymization. At the same time, the unique properties of social technology also present an opportunity to improve privacy, particularly online

The Impact of Social Expectation towards Robots on Human-Robot Interactions

This work is presented in defence of the thesis that it is possible to measure the social expectations and perceptions that humans have of robots in an explicit and succinct manner, and these measures are related to how humans interact with, and evaluate, these robots. There are many ways of understanding how humans may respond to, or reason about, robots as social actors, but the approach that was adopted within this body of work was one which focused on interaction-specific expectations, rather than expectations regarding the true nature of the robot. These expectations were investigated using a questionnaire-based tool, the University of Hertfordshire Social Roles Questionnaire, which was developed as part of the work presented in this thesis and tested on a sample of 400 visitors to an exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. This study suggested that responses to this questionnaire loaded on two main dimensions, one which related to the degree of social equality the participants expected the interactions with the robots to have, and the other was related to the degree of control they expected to exert upon the robots within the interaction. A single item, related to pet-like interactions, loaded on both and was considered a separate, third dimension. This questionnaire was deployed as part of a proxemics study, which found that the degree to which participants accepted particular proxemics behaviours was correlated with initial social expectations of the robot. If participants expected the robot to be more of a social equal, then the participants preferred the robot to approach from the front, while participants who viewed the robot more as a tool preferred it to approach from a less obtrusive angle. The questionnaire was also deployed in two long-term studies. In the first study, which involved one interaction a week over a period of two months, participant social expectations of the robots prior to the beginning of the study, not only impacted how participants evaluated open-ended interactions with the robots throughout the two-month period, but also how they collaborated with the robots in task-oriented interactions as well. In the second study, participants interacted with the robots twice a week over a period of 6 weeks. This study replicated the findings of the previous study, in that initial expectations impacted evaluations of interactions throughout the long-term study. In addition, this study used the questionnaire to measure post-interaction perceptions of the robots in terms of social expectations. The results from these suggest that while initial social expectations of robots impact how participants evaluate the robots in terms of interactional outcomes, social perceptions of robots are more closely related to the social/affective experience of the interaction

iRobot : conceptualising SERVBOT for humanoid social robots

Services are intangible in nature and, as a result, it is often difficult to measure the quality of the service. The service is usually delivered by a human to a human customer and the service literature shows SERVQUAL can be used to measure the quality of the service. However, the use of social robots during the pandemic is speeding up the process of employing social roots in frontline service settings. An extensive review of the literature shows there is a lack of an empirical model to assess the perceived service quality provided by a social robot. Furthermore, the social robot literature highlights key differences between human service and social robots. For example, scholars have highlighted the importance of entertainment and engagement in the adoption of social robots in the service industry. However, it is unclear whether the SERVQUAL dimensions are appropriate to measure social robots’ service quality. This master’s project will conceptualise the SERVBOT model to assess a social robot’s service quality. It identifies reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and entertainment as the five dimensions of SERVBOT. Further, the research will investigate how these five factors influence emotional and social engagement and intention to use the social robot in a concierge service setting. To conduct the research, a 2 x 1 (CONTROL vs SERVBOT) x (Concierge) between-subject experiment was undertaken and a total of 232 responses were collected for both stages. The results indicate that entertainment has a positive influence on emotional engagement when service is delivered by a human concierge. Further, assurance had a positive influence on social engagement when a human concierge provided the service. When a social robot concierge delivered the service, empathy and entertainment both influenced emotional engagement, and assurance and entertainment impacted social engagement favourably. For both CONTROL (human concierge) and SERVBOT (social robot concierge), emotional and social engagement had a significant influence on intentions to use. This study is the first to propose the SERVBOT model to measure social robots’ service quality. The model provides a theoretical underpinning on the key service quality dimensions of a social robot and gives scholars and managers a method to track the service quality of a social robot. The study also extends the literature by exploring the key factors that influence the use of social robots (i.e., emotional and social engagement)