Evaluating Trust and Safety in HRI : Practical Issues and Ethical Challenges

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Date of Acceptance: 11/02/2015In an effort to increase the acceptance and persuasiveness of socially assistive robots in home and healthcare environments, HRI researchers attempt to identify factors that promote human trust and perceived safety with regard to robots. Especially in collaborative contexts in which humans are requested to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role, as it is strongly linked to persuasiveness. As a result, human- robot trust can directly affect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance could have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments is not a straightforward task and, in light of a number of ethical concerns and risks, proves quite challenging. This position statement highlights a few of these points based on experiences from HRI practice and raises a few important questions that HRI researchers should consider.Final Accepted Versio

Overcoming Inner and Outer Constraints To Enhance Emerging Adult College Students’ Eudaemonic Well-Being: A Mixed Methods Study

Emerging adulthood is often recognized as a time of uncertainty, confusion, pressure, and stress. This time period also coincides in the Western world with many attending a college or university. Many emerging adults arrive at this developmental stage feeling the pressure and obligation for success but lack the resources needed to make required choices (Rogers & Maytan, 2012). Increasing levels of awareness and positive emotions represent a promising strategy for increasing eudaemonic well-being. To date, no known study has brought together constructs of self and constructs of education to foster eudemonic well-being. The current study fills gaps in the existing literature by bringing together positive psychology constructs and educational constructs. The objective of this mixed methods research project was to gain an understanding of and establish a connection between self and education for emerging adult college students in relation to eudemonic well-being. The first quantitative portion of the study sought to address the issue by examining causal relationships among dispositional mindfulness, self-esteem, academic self-concept, motivation, and eudaemonic well-being in a sample of 222 emerging adult college students. The path analysis model showed strong causal relationships among dispositional mindfulness, self-esteem, academic self-concept, motivation, and eudaemonic well-being and a correlation between dispositional mindfulness and positive reappraisal. Self-esteem, academic self-concept, and motivation mediated the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and eudaemonic well-being. Positive reappraisal within the model also predicted eudaemonic well-being as well. The second portion of the quantitative analysis consisted of experimental intervention with 102 participants (51 intervention group and 51 in the control group) and assessed the effects of mindful positive reappraisal online interventions on college students’ self-esteem, academic self-concept, motivation, and eudemonic well-being. Comparing to students receiving no interventions, students who engage in mindful positive reappraisal interventions report greater positive change from pre to post in terms of hedonic well-being., self-esteem, motivation and eudaemonic well-being. The qualitative portion of the current study consisted of interview data with 14 participants who completed the online interventions. Interview data suggested dispositional mindfulness and positive reappraisal are key in helping emerging adults overcome their limiting beliefs about their perception of themselves and about their perception of their abilities to learn and achieve. Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and subsequently self-limiting behaviors are essential to foster eudaemonic well-being

Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots : Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues

Maha Salem, Gabriella Lakatos, Farshid Amirabdollahian, K. Dautenhahn, ‘Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots: Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues’, paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics, Paris, France, 26-30 October, 2015.As robots are increasingly developed to assist humans so- cially with everyday tasks in home and healthcare settings, questions regarding the robot's safety and trustworthiness need to be addressed. The present work investigates the practical and ethical challenges in de- signing and evaluating social robots that aim to be perceived as safe and can win their human users' trust. With particular focus on collaborative scenarios in which humans are required to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role and is strongly linked to persuasiveness. Accordingly, human-robot trust can directly aect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance may have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments proves challenging in light of numerous ethical con- cerns and risks, which this paper aims to highlight and discuss based on experiences from HRI practice.Peer reviewe

Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot? : Effects of Error, Task Type and Personality on Human-Robot Cooperation and Trust

How do mistakes made by a robot affect its trustworthiness and acceptance in human-robot collaboration? We investigate how the perception of erroneous robot behavior may influence human interaction choices and the willingness to cooperate with the robot by following a number of its unusual requests. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which participants interacted with a home companion robot in one of two experimental conditions: (1) the correct mode or (2) the faulty mode. Our findings reveal that, while significantly affecting subjective perceptions of the robot and assessments of its reliability and trustworthiness, the robot's performance does not seem to substantially influence participants' decisions to (not) comply with its requests. However, our results further suggest that the nature of the task requested by the robot, e.g. whether its effects are revocable as opposed to irrevocable, has a signicant im- pact on participants' willingness to follow its instructions

How does peoples’ perception of control depend on the criticality of a task performed by a robot Paladyn

© 2019 Adeline Chanseau et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License.Robot companions are starting to become more common and people are becoming more familiar with devices such as Google Home, Alexa or Pepper,one must wonder what is the optimum way for people to control their devices? This paper provides presents an investigation into how much direct control people want to have of their robot companion and how dependent this is on the criticality of the tasks the robot performs. A live experiment was conducted in the University of Hertfordshire Robot House, with a robot companion performing four different type of tasks. The four tasks were: booking a doctor’s appointment, helping the user to build a Lego character, doing a dance with the user, and carrying biscuits for the user. The selection of these tasks was based on our previous research to define tasks which were relatively high and low in criticality. The main goal of the study was to find what level of direct control over their robot participants and if this was dependent on the criticality of the task performed by the robot. Fifty people took part in the study, and each experienced every task in a random order. Overall,it was found that participants’ perception of control was higher when the robot was performing a task in a semi-autonomous mode. However, for the task "carrying biscuits", although participants perceived to be more in control with the robot performing the task in a semi autonomous mode, they actually preferred to have the robot performing the task automatically (where they felt less in control). The results also show that, for the task "booking a doctor’s appointment", considered to be the most critical of all four tasks, participants did not prefer that the robot chose the date of the appointment as they felt infantilised.Peer reviewe

PULMONARY FUNCTION TESTS IN SHISHA-ONLY SMOKERS AND ITS CORRELATION WITH INSOMNIA IN LEBANON

Shisha smoking is continuing to be a socially acceptable method of tobacco smoking especially in the young population worldwide. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of shisha smoking on pulmonary function tests (PFT) and its correlation with insomnia in Lebanon. 382 shisha-only smokers who are less than 50 years old were recruited. A questionnaire form including inquiry about some demographic data, shisha smoking history, level of physical activity and Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI) was administered to the participants after signing an informed consent. Forced expiratory volume at one second (FEV1), forced vital capacity (FVC), and FEV1/FVC ratio were recorded using a portable spirometer. More than half of the participants showed an abnormal pattern on spirometry. Two thirds of the participants showed a global PSQI score higher than 5 indicating poor sleep quality. Yet, no statistically significant values could be detected in relating longevity of shisha smoking, last time shisha has been smoked or duration of shisha smoking session and the presence of either abnormal patterns of PFT or poor sleep quality. A statistically significant correlation showed only between the level of physical activity and normal PFT. Shisha-only smokers with frequent physical activity had significantly better PFT pattern than those with no physical activity (P\u3c 0.011). In conclusion, this study suggests that in population younger than 50 years old, shisha smoking seems not as harmful as widely believed especially in regards to lung functions and insomnia. Physical activity is a positive predictor of normal PFT

Social Finance and Financing Social Enterprises: An Islamic Finance Prospective

Enterprises that have a dual objective of generating positive social impact and financial economic benefit turned to be vital with the increased level of poverty and other major social problems accompanied with limited public spending. The growth and development of social impact enterprises is fundamental for all economies and financing them is a challenging issue where they struggle to accessing finance. Traditional financial instruments are difficult to access especially after the recent financial crisis due to that social enterprises face high risk regarding generating profit, problems of governance model, and lacks of performance measurement valuations especially when it comes to measuring social value. On the other hand, Islamic finance has experienced progressive growth in the last years and could play significant role not only limited to Muslims but also for Non-Muslim countries. Advances in Islamic Finance and Social Finance demonstrate an increasing global attention for finding alternative ways of financing and creating value in the society since both of them have similar ethical dictates. Sharia that regulates all Islamic financial instruments and investments and its screening methodology prohibits unethical businesses and practices that are similar to the negative screening methodology adopted by the socially responsible investment which make both of them connected to Social Finance. This paper is exploratory in nature and argues that Islamic finance could be a viable potential alternative with its diversified instruments for financing social impact enterprises. The paper provides insights for researchers, decision makers, and practitioners of how Islamic finance provide valid financing tools for social finance through mobilizing private funds allocated from investors who seeks investments that generate both social and economic value

Formal verification of an autonomous personal robotic assistant

Human–robot teams are likely to be used in a variety of situations wherever humans require the assistance of robotic systems. Obvious examples include healthcare and manufacturing, in which people need the assistance of machines to perform key tasks. It is essential for robots working in close proximity to people to be both safe and trustworthy. In this paper we examine formal verification of a high-level planner/scheduler for autonomous personal robotic assistants such as Care-O-bot ™ . We describe how a model of Care-O-bot and its environment was developed using Brahms, a multiagent workflow language. Formal verification was then carried out by translating this to the input language of an existing model checker. Finally we present some formal verification results and describe how these could be complemented by simulation-based testing and realworld end-user validation in order to increase the practical and perceived safety and trustworthiness of robotic assistants