Intelligent Playful Environments for Animals

© Owner/Author 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Interacción '15 Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2829875.2829879We are evolving towards an interconnected and ubiquitous world, where digital devices and interfaces progressively adapt themselves to fit our needs and ease our daily activities. Although we coexist with plenty of animal species, such as our pets, we are approaching the evolution of technology in a strictly human-centric manner. A new field in Computer Science, called Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), aims at filling this technological gap by developing systems and interfaces specifically designed for animals. Supporting animals' natural behavior and habits with suitable technology could improve both humans and animals' wellbeing. As a consequence, this doctoral research aims to explore, design and develop animal-centered intelligent systems that focus on enhancing one of the most natural animal behaviors: play. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to expand ACI with the ability of automatically manage and adapt animals play activity in order to improve their wellbeing.Work supported by MINECO (TIN2010-20488 and TIN2014-60077-R), UPV (UPV-FE-2014-24), MECD (FPU13/03831) and GVA (APOSTD/2013/013).Pons Tomás, P.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Catalá Bolós, A. (2015). Intelligent Playful Environments for Animals. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2829875.2829879SHu, F., Silver, D., and Trude, A. LonelyDog@Home. 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops, IEEE (2007), 333--337.Huizinga, J.Homo ludens. Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, The Nederlands, 1985.Mancini, C. Animal-computer interaction: a manifesto. Magazine interactions 18, 4 (2011), 69--73.Mancini, C. Animal-computer interaction (ACI): changing perspective on HCI, participation and sustainability. CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press (2013), 2227--2236.Matsuzawa, T. The Ai project: historical and ecological contexts. Animal cognition 6, 4 (2003), 199--211.Pons, P., Jaen, J., and Catala, A. Animal Ludens: Building Intelligent Playful Environments for Animals. 11th Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment - Workshop on Animal Human Computer Interaction, (2014).Pons, P., Jaen, J., and Catala, A. Envisioning Future Playful Interactive Environments for Animals. In A. Nijholt, ed., More Playful User Interfaces. Springer, 2015.Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Guest, C., and Harris, R. Empowering assistance dogs: an alarm interface for canine use. Intelligent Systems for Animal Welfare, (2014).Rumbaugh, D.M., Gill, T. V., Brown, J. V., et al. A computer-controlled language training system for investigating the language skills of young apes. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation 5, 5 (1973), 385--392.Westerlaken, M. and Gualeni, S. Felino: The Philosophical Practice of Making an Interspecies Videogame. The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, (2014), 1--12.Wingrave, C.A., Rose, J., Langston, T., and LaViola, J.J.J. Early explorations of CAT: canine amusement and training. CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (2010), 2661--2669.SpeakDolphin. http://www.speakdolphin.com

Emotional engagements predict and enhance social cognition in young chimpanzees

Social cognition in infancy is evident in coordinated triadic engagements, that is, infants attending jointly with social partners and objects. Current evolutionary theories of primate social cognition tend to highlight species differences in cognition based on human-unique cooperative motives. We consider a developmental model in which engagement experiences produce differential outcomes. We conducted a 10-year-long study in which two groups of laboratory-raised chimpanzee infants were given quantifiably different engagement experiences. Joint attention, cooperativeness, affect, and different levels of cognition were measured in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees, and compared to outcomes derived from a normative human database. We found that joint attention skills significantly improved across development for all infants, but by 12 months, the humans significantly surpassed the chimpanzees. We found that cooperativeness was stable in the humans, but by 12 months, the chimpanzee group given enriched engagement experiences significantly surpassed the humans. Past engagement experiences and concurrent affect were significant unique predictors of both joint attention and cooperativeness in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees. When engagement experiences and concurrent affect were statistically controlled, joint attention and cooperation were not associated. We explain differential social cognition outcomes in terms of the significant influences of previous engagement experiences and affect, in addition to cognition. Our study highlights developmental processes that underpin the emergence of social cognition in support of evolutionary continuity

Animal Controlled Computer Games: Playing Pacman against Real Crickets

Abstract. We explore the possibilities of replacing behaviour-generating code in computer games by real-time behaviour of live animals, and the question of whether one can play computer games against animals. To experience the differences for a human between playing against an animal or against computer code, we experimented with a variant of Pac-Man where the behaviour of virtual game characters is derived from that of live crickets in a real maze. Initial results are described in this paper.