I recently changed the provider for my other blog, which lives at ArvidKappas.com – I used this occasion to recreate the site. It is not yet finished, but it takes shape. So if you are curious, why don’t you head over. I flushed old blog posts there and here while I was at it. So now there is room to grow. I just need more time … 🙂
Arvid Kappas, Constructor University
As social robots appear more frequently in laboratories and the real world, the question is how emotional robots should be, when, and why? I’ll talk about affective computing and why we might learn more about humans than robots when trying to create emotion-savvy robots.
I am very excited to present on Friday, March 10th, 2023, at the International Convention on Psychological Science in Brussels in the context of the Integrative Science Symposium The Future of Psychology and Robotics organized by Eric Vanman (University of Queensland, Australia) and Sang Eun Woo (Purdue University, USA). I will be sharing the stage with Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (RWTH Aachen University, Germany), Ruud Hortensius (Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Agnieszka Wykowska (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy)
Much research on the interaction of humans and robots focuses on dydadic interaction, or at best a few humans with one robot. Below a photo from the FRACTOS study where a robot and a virtual tutor create a triad with a child in a learning task on fractions.
In social psychology, much research deals with how groups interact with one another. The us vs them, that is at the heart of much conflict. This is not yet a topic of much social robotics research and theory. However, this is of course a function of the small number of robots in the wild. In a science fiction movie it is easy to have hordes of robots being part of a busy street scene, such as in the classic I, Robot movie. But which research group possesses enough robots to create real groups? Who has interacted with large quantities of robots in their place of work? However, it is only a question of time that robots will cease to be novelties and intergroup psychologiy of mixed human/robot society will be a thing. I am convinced that in this decade it will become important to foreshadow how robots might become part of human groups, or how groups of humans and robots will interact in collaboration or competition.
Some of these issues are dealt with in a recent paper with Eric Vanman.
Society’s increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. People tend to perceive social robots as autonomous and capable of having a mind. As such, they are also more likely to be subject to social categorization by humans. As social robots become more human like, people may also feel greater empathy for them and treat robots more like (human) ingroup members. On the other hand, as they become more human like, robots also challenge our human distinctiveness, threaten our identity, and elicit suspicion about their ability to deceive us with their human‐like qualities. We review relevant research to explore this apparent paradox, particularly from an intergroup relations perspective. We discuss these findings and propose three research questions that we believe social psychologists are ideally suited to address.
Vanman, EJ, Kappas, A. “Danger, Will Robinson!” The challenges of social robots for intergroup relations. Soc Personal Psychol Compass. 2019; 13:e12489. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12489
The ANIMATAS position at my lab has been filled There are no open positions at present.
I am looking for candidates with a psychology background for the new ANIMATAS (Advancing human machine interaction with human-like social capabilities for education in schools) project. ANIMATAS (MSCA – ITN – 2017 – 765955 2) is a H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie European Training Network funded by Horizon 2020 (the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation), coordinated by Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France). The person working with me would be based at Jacobs University Bremen. The topic is
Arte has presented a program on affective computing this October. In German it is called Vermessung der Gefühle and it is available online in German and French until Mid November, 2016. Our project EMOTE is also mentioned in the program.
A friend alerted me on Facebook to this Youtube video which is on the IEEE Spectrum page. Roboticists struggling to define the Uncanny Valley in one minute. (Thanks Astrid!)
Somehow it is really amazing which role the Uncanny Valley has taken in pop culture – and in research as well. I remember when I started to get interested in the phenomenon it was neither well known, not taken very seriously. A colleague who I had asked said “… well it is not really something that is much taken serious among roboticists — perhaps you joke about it after a few glasses of Sake.”
I was not so sure about whether this is true because it was interesting that there seemed to be a taboo to create robots that were too human … obviously the early work of David Hanson and of course Hiroshi Ishiguro were the exceptions. Otherwise robots would have blank plates as faces or would display only the most symbolic facial features.
So listening to the video I am fascinated that people do not primarily focus on the fact that the Uncanny Valley is first and foremost an hypothesis which was presented by Masahiro Mori in 1970. It is thus a theoretical construct, not a thing, or a phenomenon. Whether the phenomenon exists, for whom, for how long and all of that are empirical questions. At this point the evidence is mixed. What do you think?
(trying to get a poll here …)
CALL FOR NOMINATIONS/APPLICATIONS FOR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The IEEE Computer Society seeks nominations and applications for the volunteer position of Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for the IEEE Transactions on Aff ective Computing (TAC) serving a two-year term starting 1 January 2015.
IEEE TAC is a cross disciplinary and international archive journal aimed at disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena. The journal publishes original research on the principles and theories explaining why and how affective factors condition interaction between humans and technology, on how affective sensing and simulation techniques can inform our understanding of human affective processes, and on the design, implementation and evaluation of systems that carefully consider affect among the factors that influence their usability.
The EIC will be responsible for the day-to-day volunteer leadership of TAC, including coordinating and overseeing the peer review process; recommending candidates for the editorial board; chairing the editorial board; developing editorial plans for the publication; serving as a non-voting, exofficio member of the Publications Board; serving as a non-voting ex-officio member of the Steering Committee for TAC, and working in general with volunteers and staff to ensure and maintain the timely publication of an exceptionally high-quality transactions.
Applications should include a complete curriculum vita, a brief plan for the future of TAC, and a letter of support from the candidate’s institution or employer. The plan should include (1) the candidate’s perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the enhancement and improvement of the quality of TAC, (2) specific tasks to be undertaken if appointed EIC, (3) objective milestones associated with each task, and (4) a proposed schedule.
The search committee prefers electronic submissions in Microsoft Word or PDF. Please direct all questions and submit completed applications to Kimberly Sperka,
ksperka@computer.org.
The due date for nominations and applications is 7 February 2014.
Additional information about the IEEE Computer Society, the co-sponsoring societies, and the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is available at http://www.computer.org and www.computer.org/tac
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US Navy 090207-N-9610C-007 A remote-controlled robot used by Explosive Ordnance Disposal Expeditionary Support Unit (EODESU) 1 called (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Interwebz are buzzing with reports regarding the PhD work of Dr. Julie Carpenter at the College of Education at the University of Washington. She has interviewed Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) personnel who work with robots to clear dangerous explosives. These machines are very purpose-built for difficult terrain and manipulating particular types of objects.
Not very cute, not very pretty – and yet, according to Dr. Carpenter’s work, handlers may feel quite strongly about their machines. They might assign them gender, they give them names – and they feel not well when they are destroyed in the call of duty. Specifically, there appears to be a trend to attribute human traits to these machines (some more details here).
English: INDIAN HEAD, Md. (Feb. 26, 2009) Warren Tibbs, a robot operator for Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Technical Division, Indian Head, Md., shows the many different robots that are developed on the base and used by EOD technicians and civilian police department SWAT team members. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jhi L. Scott/Released) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I still have not read the thesis itself, as the news regarding this just broke, and I do not want to go into details regarding the potential military implications if the handlers of such machines feel empathy towards them – there is apparently a discussion already out there. Instead, I want to focus briefly on the importance of time spent and experience with machines and the development and expression of empathic sentiments and the implications for research on social relationships with robots.
Many studies on the uncanny valley, or others that deal with the relationship of humans and machines confront relatively unprepared participants with devices of various complexity in the laboratory, or laboratory-like contexts. Perhaps this is really not a great idea. Possibly, uncanny valley effects disappear quickly with machines that approach human perfection. This is an idea that Astrid Rosenthal von der Pütten, who is working on empathic responses to robots, proposed when we discussed such phenomena. Perhaps, the other side of the coin is that very non-human machines may become very close to us if we work with them day-in, day-out. If this is so, then we should take results of research that studies exclusively responses to unfamiliar stimuli with a grain of salt. With this I mean either responses of people who are generally unfamiliar with robots, or even with people who have some familiarity with robots but not a particular type of robot. I do not want to question the usefulness of such studies in general – in my own laboratory, for example, we are investigating responses to artificial entities of various kinds in the laboratory and measure behavioral, physiological, and subjective responses of student participants who have little experience with the types of stimuli we use. However, we and other researchers in this field should keep the influence of experience and familiarity in mind.
Repliee Q2. Taken at Index Osaka Note: The model of Repliee Q2 is probably same as Repliee Q1expo, Ayako Fujii, announcer of NHK. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Remember how people responded first to cars, or the famous report of how people responded to early films of the brothers Lumiere? Apparently, people were shocked, scared, ran away (the extreme versions of this story are likely to be urban legend). These responses are difficult for us to imagine – so much have we gotten used to the highly mechanized and mediatized environments we grow up in. Possibly, if we would grow up in a robotized environment, there would be no odd sensation to almost-human machines and we might feel deeply for machines that are very much not humanoid. For me the fictional version of this is the relationship of the character Freeman Lowell played by Bruce Dern in the movie Silent Running with the three little robot drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie, As he spends more and more time with them, his emotional bond becomes stronger and stronger – and this means not just feeling warm and fuzzy, but displaying a whole range of emotions toward them and reacting very strongly to their actions.
The idea to create anthropomorphic robots is today often associated with the uncanny geminoids of Hiroshi Ishiguro. However, the idea to build anthropomorphic automatons is of course much older. Most famous is probably the chess player automaton The Turk by von Kempelen in 1769.
An illustration of the workings of the model. The various parts were directed by a human via interior levers and machinery. This is a distorted measurement based on Racknitz’s calculations, showing an impossible design in relation to the actual dimensions of the machine. Standage, 88 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Less known is the French tradition to use anthropomorphic automatons for advertising purposes. A recent BBC piece shows some rare and interesting clips from an exhibition at the Musée de l’automate de Souillac. Recommended! Here is a different version of the video.
… and if you cannot get enough of the early automatons … check this site out.
Affective Computing Science 