March 2019 – Human Robot Interaction

Being a PHD student in HRI

A discussion about being a PhD student in the field of HRI and what happens afterwards.

Most research at universities is done by PhD students. They are an essential part in the progress of science. The relationship between a PhD student and his or her supervisor is not unlike a marriage as Jorge Cham pointed out. It lasts for a couple of years, starts with a proposal, and culminates in a ceremony where you walk down the aisle dressed in a gown. Naïve young people enter, and around 50% end up in bitter remorse. In today’s special episode I talk to three of my former PhD students, Omar Mubin, Eduardo Sandoval, and Jakub Zlotowski, whom I met at a conference in Sydney. We talk about live during and after a PhD.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant Links

The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity by The Royal Commision
The future of the postdoc by Kendall Powell
Marriage vs. the PhD by Jorge Cham

Best Paper Award at the HRI2019 Conference

Tony Belpaeme won the best paper award at the HRI2019 conference.

Tony Belpaeme and his team won the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2019 for their paper “Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots:A Large-Scale Study“. You can download a free copy of the paper here.

The abstract of the paper is:

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of arobot’s iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3)the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot’s iconic gestures on learning gains.

Aldebaran Or How To Sell A Robot

Developing and selling a social robot is challenging and many companies have failed.

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The business of creating and selling social robots is risky. Many companies have tried to sell social robots and only few have succeeded to sustain their business over a longer period of time. Aldebaran, or Softbank Robotics, as it is known today, is one of the biggest companies selling social robots to human-robot interaction researchers. Their Nao and Pepper robots are being widely used in the research community. I had the chance to talk with Amit Kumar Pandey, the head principal scientist at Softbank Robotics and Franziska Kirstein from Blue Ocean Robotics about how they develop robots.

ISSN 2703-4054

Relevant Links:

Autonomous Vehicles – Legal Concerns

The legal concerns about liability in crashes with autonomous vehicles are a main obstacle in the deployment of this technology.

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We continue our discussion on autonomous vehicles and focus in this episode on the legal aspects. In particular the issues around liability are a major obstacle for the wide adoption of autonomous vehicles. Who will be responsible for damages caused by auto pilots? Will it be the driver, the manufacturer of the car or maybe even the car itself? I talked with Professor Tracy Hresko Pearl, Professor Ryan Calo and Professor Alan R. Wagner about what needs to happen in our legal system to be able to deal with the liability around autonomous vehicles.

Autonomous Vehicles – The Future Of Transportation

Autonomous vehicles will change the future of transportation. We will discuss the ethical implications.

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Autonomous vehicles are one of the most interesting topics in human-robot interaction right now. While they are not humanoid in shape, they are one of the biggest, deadliest and most promising robots available to the general public. They have the potential to dramatically change how we get from point a to b and what infrastructure we need. But they also raises many ethical issues besides a long list of technical challenges.

Driving a car is inherently dangerous once you drive at a practical speed. Your autonomous vehicle needs to be able to deal with all sorts of traffic situations, weather conditions and even unpredictable human operators. This is an enormous challenge.

I talked with Professor Robert Sparrow from the Monarch University, Professor Tracy Hresko Pearl and Professor Alan R. Wagner about the future of transportation with autonomous vehicles. The core question is: when will it become illegal for humans to drive cars?

Transcript

The transcript of the episode is available as a PDF. You can also follow the episode with subtitles through Descript.

HRI-Podcast-Episode-001-Autonomous-Vehicles-Future-Transportation-Transcript

ISSN 2703-4054

Book Progress Update

We are completing the last updates on the book and hope to be able to submit the final draft to the publisher next week. We have cleared the copyright for more than a hundred figures. The next steps will be the copy editing and layout from Cambridge University Press.