Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children : What do potential users think?

Luke Wood, Hagen Lehmann, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Ben Robins, Austen Rayner, and Dag Syrdal, ‘Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children: What do potential users think?’, paper presented at the 50th Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 1 April 2014 – 4 April 2014, London, UK.When police officers are conducting interviews with children, some of the disclosures can be quite shocking. This can make it difficult for an officer to maintain their composure without subtly indicating their shock to the child, which can in turn impede the information acquisition process. Using a robotic interviewer could eliminate this problem as the behaviours and expressions of the robot can be consciously controlled. To date research investigating the potential of Robot-Mediated Interviews has focused on establishing whether children will respond to robots in an interview scenario and if so how well. The results of these studies indicate that children will talk to a robot in an interview scenario in a similar way to which they talk to a human interviewer. However, in order to test if this approach would work in a real world setting, it is important to establish what the experts (e.g. specialist child interviewers) would require from the system. To determine the needs of the users we conducted a user panel with a group of potential real world users to gather their views of our current system and find out what they would require for the system to be useful to them. The user group we worked with consisted of specialist child protection police officers based in the UK. The findings from this panel suggest that a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system would need to be more flexible than our current system in order to respond to unpredictable situations and paths of investigation. This paper gives an insight into what real world users would need from a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system

Robot-mediated interviews : Does a robotic interviewer impact question difficulty and information recovery?

Luke Wood, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Hagen Lehmnn, Ben Robbins, Austen Rainer, and Dag Sverre Syrdal, 'Robot-Mediated Interviews: Does a Robotic Interviewer Impact Question Difficulty and Information Recovery?', Assistive Technology : From Research to Practice, proceedings of the AAATE 2013 Conference, 19 - 22 September 2013, Villamoura, Portugal, ISBN: 9781614993032 (print), ISBN: 9781614993049 (electronic), published by IOS Press. Available online at doi: 10.3233/978-1-61499-304-9-131Our previous research has shown that children respond to a robotic interviewer very similar compared to a human interviewer, pointing towards the prospect of using robot-mediated interviews in situations where human interviewers face certain challenges. This follow-up study investigated how 20 children (aged between 7 and 9) respond to questions of varying difficulty from a robotic interviewer compared to a human interviewer. Each child participated in two interviews, one with an adult and one with a humanoid robot called KASPAR, the main questions in these interviews focused on the theme of pets and animals. After each interview the children were asked to rate the difficulty of the questions and particular aspects of the experience. Measures include the behavioural coding of the children's behaviour during the interviews, the transcripts of what the children said and questionnaire data. The results from quantitative data analysis reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR in a very similar manner to how they interacted with the human interviewer, and provided both interviewers with similar information and amounts of information regardless of question difficulty

Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

Quantifying the Effects of Prosody Modulation on User Engagement and Satisfaction in Conversational Systems

As voice-based assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant become ubiquitous, users increasingly expect to maintain natural and informative conversations with such systems. However, for an open-domain conversational system to be coherent and engaging, it must be able to maintain the user's interest for extended periods, without sounding boring or annoying. In this paper, we investigate one natural approach to this problem, of modulating response prosody, i.e., changing the pitch and cadence of the response to indicate delight, sadness or other common emotions, as well as using pre-recorded interjections. Intuitively, this approach should improve the naturalness of the conversation, but attempts to quantify the effects of prosodic modulation on user satisfaction and engagement remain challenging. To accomplish this, we report results obtained from a large-scale empirical study that measures the effects of prosodic modulation on user behavior and engagement across multiple conversation domains, both immediately after each turn, and at the overall conversation level. Our results indicate that the prosody modulation significantly increases both immediate and overall user satisfaction. However, since the effects vary across different domains, we verify that prosody modulations do not substitute for coherent, informative content of the responses. Together, our results provide useful tools and insights for improving the naturalness of responses in conversational systems.Comment: Published in CHIIR 2020, 4 page

Acoustic Correlates of Information Structure.

This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subject-verb-object sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people's productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences

Avoiding the uncanny valley : robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-007-9058-3This article presents the results of video-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials which investigated people’s perceptions of different robot appearances and associated attention-seeking features and behaviors displayed by robots with different appearance and behaviors. The HRI trials studied the participants’ preferences for various features of robot appearance and behavior, as well as their personality attributions towards the robots compared to their own personalities. Overall, participants tended to prefer robots with more human-like appearance and attributes. However, systematic individual differences in the dynamic appearance ratings are not consistent with a universal effect. Introverts and participants with lower emotional stability tended to prefer the mechanical looking appearance to a greater degree than other participants. It is also shown that it is possible to rate individual elements of a particular robot’s behavior and then assess the contribution, or otherwise, of that element to the overall perception of the robot by people. Relating participants’ dynamic appearance ratings of individual robots to independent static appearance ratings provided evidence that could be taken to support a portion of the left hand side of Mori’s theoretically proposed ‘uncanny valley’ diagram. Suggestions for future work are outlined.Peer reviewe

A systematic review of attitudes, anxiety, acceptance, and trust towards social robots

As social robots become more common, there is a need to understand how people perceive and interact with such technology. This systematic review seeks to estimate people’s attitudes toward, trust in, anxiety associated with, and acceptance of social robots; as well as factors that are associated with these beliefs. Ninety-seven studies were identified with a combined sample of over 13,000 participants and a standardized score was computed for each in order to represent the valence (positive, negative, or neutral) and magnitude (on a scale from 1 to − 1) of people’s beliefs about robots. Potential moderating factors such as the robots’ domain of application and design, the type of exposure to the robot, and the characteristics of potential users were also investigated. The findings suggest that people generally have positive attitudes towards social robots and are willing to interact with them. This finding may challenge some of the existing doubt surrounding the adoption of robotics in social domains of application but more research is needed to fully understand the factors that influence attitudes

Companion robots for elderly people : Using theatre to investigate potential users' views

A theatre production of a play illustrating the functionality, social and ethical aspects of robots helping with aspects of elderly care was presented at a residential care home. The audience consisted of mainly elderly residents and carers. The residents suffered from various physical and mental disabilities which impaired their ability to provide responses through standard questionnaires. Therefore, additional structured interviews were used to gain insight into their views on the theatre scenario. Both carers and residents were generally positive towards the idea of using robots to help with care. Residents in particular stressed the desire for care robots to also provide social interaction and entertainment