Teaching geometrical principles to design students

We propose a new method of teaching the principles of geometry to design students. The students focus on a field of design in which geometry is the design: tessellation. We review different approaches to geometry and the field of tessellation before we discuss the setup of the course. Instead of employing 2D drawing tools, such as Adobe Illustrator, the students define their tessellation in mathematical formulas, using the Mathematica software. This procedure enables them to understand the mathematical principles on which graphical tools, such as Illustrator are built upon. But we do not stop at a digital representation of their tessellation design we continue to cut their tessellations in Perspex. It moves the abstract concepts of math into the real world, so that the students can experience them directly, which provides a tremendous reward to the students

Teaching geometrical principles to design students

We propose a new method of teaching the principles of geometry to design students. The students focus on a field of design in which geometry is the design: tessellation. We review different approaches to geometry and the field of tessellation before we discuss the setup of the course. Instead of employing 2D drawing tools, such as Adobe Illustrator, the students define their tessellation in mathematical formulas, using the Mathematica software. This procedure enables them to understand the mathematical principles on which graphical tools, such as Illustrator are built upon. But we do not stop at a digital representation of their tessellation design we continue to cut their tessellations in Perspex. It moves the abstract concepts of math into the real world, so that the students can experience them directly, which provides a tremendous reward to the students

On the creation of standards for interaction between real robots and virtual worlds

Research on virtual worlds and environments has increased tremendously in the last decade, giving birth to a variety of applications spanning over several areas such as virtual reality, human-computer interaction, psychology and sociology, among others. In this paper we elaborate on one issue affecting the areas of virtual worlds and robotics: the lack of standard mechanisms for communication and interaction between virtual worlds and robots. We contribute to the scientific community our thoughts on the possibility of creating a standard platform that enable the seamless interaction between these heterogeneous, distributed devices and systems. Hopefully, these ideas will turn, in the future, into applications that not only address the challenges in communication, control and interoperability of such systems (robots and virtual worlds), but also help to improve the standard of life of people through tangible products and services

An End-to-End Conversational Style Matching Agent

We present an end-to-end voice-based conversational agent that is able to engage in naturalistic multi-turn dialogue and align with the interlocutor's conversational style. The system uses a series of deep neural network components for speech recognition, dialogue generation, prosodic analysis and speech synthesis to generate language and prosodic expression with qualities that match those of the user. We conducted a user study (N=30) in which participants talked with the agent for 15 to 20 minutes, resulting in over 8 hours of natural interaction data. Users with high consideration conversational styles reported the agent to be more trustworthy when it matched their conversational style. Whereas, users with high involvement conversational styles were indifferent. Finally, we provide design guidelines for multi-turn dialogue interactions using conversational style adaptation

Who like androids more: Japanese or US Americans?

This study investigates to what degree the userspsila cultural background influences their perception of a robotpsilas anthropomorphism and likeability. More specifically, robots with a conventional robot-like appearance were compared to highly anthropomorphic androids. The US American participants like the robots on average more than the Japanese participants do, but a strong interaction effect was observed between the participantspsila cultural background and the type of robot. The Japanese participants had a strong preference for conventional robots. This confirms the stereotype that Japanese like conventional robots. However, this does not hold true for highly anthropomorphic androids, which they liked less than the US American participants did. This study focused on the perception of static images of robots and the results may be different for the perception of movies of moving robots or, to an even greater extent, the perception when standing right in front of a moving robot

Killing a Robot

Robots are being introduced into our society but their social status is still unclear. A critical issue is if the robot’s exhibition of intelligent life-like behavior leads to the human’s perception of animacy and therefore a hesitance to destroy the robot. This study proposes an experiment that investigates if humans destroy a robot differently depending on the robot’s levels of intelligent life-like behavior