Emerging Artificial Societies Through Learning

The NewTies project is implementing a simulation in which societies of agents are expected to de-velop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve environmental challenges by acting collectively. The challenges are in-tended to be analogous to those faced by early, simple, small-scale human societies. This report on work in progress outlines the major features of the system as it is currently conceived within the project, including the design of the agents, the environment, the mechanism for the evolution of language and the peer-to-peer infrastructure on which the simulation runs.Artificial Societies, Evolution of Language, Decision Trees, Peer-To-Peer Networks, Social Learning

Shaping Gestures to Shape Personality: Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores and the Similarity-Attraction Effect

This paper explores the role of personality as a mediation variable between observable behaviour of a robot — in this case, gestures of different energy and spatial extension — and the experience of its users according to the Godspeed questionnaire, a standard instrument for gathering subjective ratings of human-robot interaction. The results show that the personality traits that the users attribute to a robot are, to a certain extent, predictive of the subjective scores, i.e., of the quality of the interaction they have with it. Furthermore, the experiments show that 15 of the 30 observers involved in the experiments tend to like the robot more when they attribute traits to it that more similar to their own. The observation that only part of the observers display such a tendency — known as similarityattraction effect — might explain why previous investigations of the same phenomenon have provided contradictory results