A Self for robots: core elements and ascription by humans

Modern robotics is interested in developing humanoid robots with meta-cognitive capabilities in order to create systems that have the possibility of dealing efficiently with the presence of novel situations and unforeseen inputs. Given the relational nature of human beings, with a glimpse into the future of assistive robots, it seems relevant to start thinking about the nature of the interaction with such robots, increasingly human-like not only from the outside but also in terms of behavior. The question posed in this abstract concerns the possibility of ascribing the robot not only a mind but a more profound dimension: a Self

Can robots impact human comfortability during a live interview?

Interaction among humans does not always proceed without errors; situations might happen in which a wrong word or attitude can cause the partner to feel uneasy. However, humans are often very sensitive to these interaction failures and may be able to fix them. Our research aims to endow robots with the same skill. Thus the first step, presented in this short paper, investigates to what extent a humanoid robot can impact someone's Comfortability in a realistic setting. To capture natural reactions, a set of real interviews performed by the humanoid robot iCub (acting as the interviewer) were organized. The interviews were designed in collaboration with a journalist from the press office of our institution and are meant to appear on the official institutional online magazine. The dialogue along with fluent human-like robotic actions were chosen not only to gather information about the participants' personal interests and professional career, necessary for the magazine column, but also to influence their Comfortability. Once the experiment is completed, the participants' self-report and spontaneous reactions (physical and physiological cues) will be explored to tackle the way people's Comfortability may be manifested through non-verbal cues, and the way it may be impacted by the humanoid robot

Melanoma mouse model implicates metabotropic glutamate signaling in melanocytic neoplasia

To gain insight into melanoma pathogenesis, we characterized an insertional mouse mutant, TG3, that is predisposed to develop multiple melanomas. Physical mapping identified multiple tandem insertions of the transgene into intron 3 of Grm1 (encoding metabotropic glutamate receptor 1) with concomitant deletion of 70 kb of intronic sequence. To assess whether this insertional mutagenesis event results in alteration of transcriptional regulation, we analyzed Grm1 and two flanking genes for aberrant expression in melanomas from TG3 mice. We observed aberrant expression of only Grm1. Although we did not detect its expression in normal mouse melanocytes, Grm1 was ectopically expressed in the melanomas from TG3 mice. To confirm the involvement of Grm1 in melanocytic neoplasia, we created an additional transgenic line with Grm1 expression driven by the dopachrome tautomerase promoter. Similar to the original TG3, the Tg(Grm1)EPv line was susceptible to melanoma. In contrast to human melanoma, these transgenic mice had a generalized hyperproliferation of melanocytes with limited transformation to fully malignant metastasis. We detected expression of GRM1 in a number of human melanoma biopsies and cell lines but not in benign nevi and melanocytes. This study provides compelling evidence for the importance of metabotropic glutamate signaling in melanocytic neoplasia