Developing social action capabilities in a humanoid robot using an interaction history architecture

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/ICHR.2008.4756013We present experimental results for the humanoid robot Kaspar2 engaging in a simple “peekaboo” interaction game with a human partner. The robot develops the capability to engage in the game by using its history of interactions coupled with audio and visual feedback from the interaction partner to continually generate increasingly appropriate behaviour. The robot also uses facial expressions to feedback its level of reward to the partner. The results support the hypothesis that reinforcement of time-extended experiences through interaction allows a robot to act appropriately in an interaction

Robot Self-Characterisation of Experience Using Trajectories in Sensory-Motor Phase Space

Peer reviewe

Exploring the Design Space of Robot Appearance and Behavior in an Attention-Seeking Living Room Scenario for a Robot Companion

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.---- Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. --DOI : 10.1109/ALIFE.2007.36781

Human Resource Management Practices, Work Intensity, and Workplace Deviance: Exploring the Moderating Role of Core Self-Evaluations

Drawing on social exchange, conservation of resources, and self-verification theories, I conduct two studies to examine the impact of perceived human resource management (HRM) practices on workplace deviance. The first study hypothesizes that perceived maintenance and development HRM bundles have a negative indirect effect on deviance via work intensity. Using a two-wave research design (n = 69), the results demonstrated that both HRM bundles were negatively related to deviance via work intensity. The post-hoc analyses revealed that both HRM bundles had an indirect negative effect on organizational deviance, but were not indirectly related to interpersonal deviance. The second study hypothesizes two moderated mediated models to understand some key moderating effects in the HRM practices and organizational deviance relationship. I first examine a three-way interaction between work intensity, core self-evaluations (CSE), and identity threat on organizational deviance. Afterwards, I hypothesize that this three-way interaction shapes the negative indirect effect of both perceived HRM bundles on organizational deviance via work intensity. Using a cross-sectional research design (n = 125), the results revealed a significant three-way interaction between work intensity, CSE, and identity threat on organizational deviance. The results further revealed that this three-way interaction moderated the indirect effect of perceived development HRM practices (but not perceived maintenance HRM practices) on organizational deviance through work intensity. Consistent with social exchange theory, this research demonstrates that work intensity mediates the relationship between perceived HRM practices and deviance, thereby advancing our understanding of the ‘black box’ between HRM practices and employee outcomes. This research also highlights the moderating roles of CSE and identity threat in the work intensity and organizational deviance relationship. These results demonstrate that the negative relationship between work intensity and organizational deviance strengthens when high CSE employees experience low identity threat. That is, this three-way interaction supports much of the CSE literature that points to the positive implications associated with high CSE, but it also contrasts the mainstream literature by revealing that high CSE may not always be desirable. This research also reveals some of the boundary conditions, namely, CSE and identity threat, in the perceived HRM practices and organizational deviance relationship

Group living homes for older people with dementia: Concept and effects

Eefsting, J.A. [Promotor]Pot, A.M. [Promotor]Depla, M.F.I.A. [Copromotor]Lange, J. de [Copromotor

A middleware for a large array of cameras

Large arrays of cameras are increasingly being employed for producing high quality image sequences needed for motion analysis research. This leads to the logistical problem with coordination and control of a large number of cameras. In this paper, we used a lightweight multi-agent system for coordinating such camera arrays. The agent framework provides more than a remote sensor access API. It allows reconfigurable and transparent access to cameras, as well as software agents capable of intelligent processing. Furthermore, it eases maintenance by encouraging code reuse. Additionally, our agent system includes an automatic discovery mechanism at startup, and multiple language bindings. Performance tests showed the lightweight nature of the framework while validating its correctness and scalability. Two different camera agents were implemented to provide access to a large array of distributed cameras. Correct operation of these camera agents was confirmed via several image processing agents

An empirical framework for human-robot proxemics

The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects COGNIRON ("The Cognitive Robot Companion") and LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions) and was funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP6- 002020 and FP7-215554.An empirical framework for Human-Robot (HR) proxemics is proposed which shows how the measurement and control of interpersonal distances between a human and a robot can be potentially used by the robot to interpret, predict and manipulate proxemic behaviour for Human-Robot Interactions (HRIs). The proxemic framework provides for incorporation of inter-factor effects, and can be extended to incorporate new factors, updated values and results. The framework is critically discussed and future work proposed

Identification of homologs in insignificant blast hits by exploiting extrinsic gene properties

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Homology is a key concept in both evolutionary biology and genomics. Detection of homology is crucial in fields like the functional annotation of protein sequences and the identification of taxon specific genes. Basic homology searches are still frequently performed by pairwise search methods such as BLAST. Vast improvements have been made in the identification of homologous proteins by using more advanced methods that use sequence profiles. However additional improvement could be made by exploiting sources of genomic information other than the primary sequence or tertiary structure.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We test the hypothesis that extrinsic gene properties gene length and gene order can be of help in differentiating spurious sequence similarity from homology in the gray zone. Sharing gene order and similarity in size dramatically increase the chance of a query-hit pair being homologous: gray zone query-hit pairs of similar size and with conserved gene order are homologous in 99% of all cases, while for query-hit pairs without gene order conservation and with different sizes this is only 55%.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We have shown that using gene length and gene order drastically improves the detection of homologs within the BLAST gray zone. Our findings suggest that the use of such extrinsic gene properties can also improve the performance of homology detection by more advanced methods, and our study thereby underscores the importance of true data integration for fully exploiting genomic information.</p

Library consortia in Germany

Whenever German librarians talk about consortia in the presence of lawyers (even if they are libarians themselves) they meet with vehement protest. In German the legal term „consortium“ is restricted to a relatively narrow meaning. In „Meyers neues Lexikon“ from 1993 it is defined as: „Bank merger for stock exchange dealings and credit transactions ...“ And from the same source the definition of consortial business: „Syndicate business for which several members (mostly banks) join up for a consortium. Reasons for forming a consortium are: 1. Overstraining of the financial resources of each individual consortium member, 2. spreading of risks ...“ 1 While risk-spreading is not really an issue for libraries, their financial resources are undoubtedly overstrained. There are three reasons: the pricing policy – that is to say the heavy annual price rise – of the publishers, the rapidly increasing number of academic publications not likely to slow down in the foreseeable future as well as the expectations and wishes of our users and customers, the scientific community. Therefore, the term „purchasing association“ may be the correct one from a (German) legal point of view. As in many similar cases the term was adopted from an Anglo-American background with a much broader meaning: „Partnership, association. Now more specifically an association of business, banking or manufacturing organizations.“ 2 In Germany the term „consortium“ is now widely used for joint actions of libraries