Getting acquainted: First steps for child-robot relationship formation

In this article we discuss two studies of children getting acquainted with an autonomous socially assistive robot. The success of the first encounter is key for a sustainable long-term supportive relationship. We provide four validated behavior design elements that enable the robot to robustly get acquainted with the child. The first are five...

The influence of interdependence and a transparent or explainable communication style on human-robot teamwork

Humans and robots are increasingly working together in human-robot teams. Teamwork requires communication, especially when interdependence between team members is high. In previous work, we identified a conceptual difference between sharing what you are doing (i.e., being transparent) and why you are doing it (i.e., being explainable). Although...

Memory-Based Personalization for Fostering a Long-Term Child-Robot Relationship

After the novelty effect wears off children need a new motivator to keep interacting with a social robot. Enabling children to build a relationship with the robot is the key for facilitating a sustainable long-term interaction. We designed a memory-based personalization strategy that safeguards the continuity between sessions and tailors the...

Pupil Diameter as Implicit Measure to Estimate Sense of Embodiment

We explore pupil diameter (PD) as estimator of Sense of Embodiment (SoE) using data of three user studies. We hypothesize that pupil diameter reflects SoE in a direct and indirect way. If individuals feel strongly embodied, presenting an emotional stimulus like a threat to the surrogate will produce a strong response, as if the stimulus would be...

Co-creation as a Facilitator for Co-regulation in Child-Robot Interaction

While interacting with a social robot, children have a need to express themselves and have their expressions acknowledged by the robot. A need that is often unaddressed by the robot, due to its limitations in understanding the expressions of children. To keep the child-robot interaction manageable the robot takes control, undermining children's...

Human-centered XAI: Developing design patterns for explanations of clinical decision support systems

Much of the research on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has centered on providing transparency of machine learning models. More recently, the focus on human-centered approaches to XAI has increased. Yet, there is a lack of practical methods and examples on the integration of human factors into the development processes of AI-generated...

Interpretable confidence measures for decision support systems

Decision support systems (DSS) have improved significantly but are more complex due to recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. Current XAI methods generate explanations on model behaviour to facilitate a user's understanding, which incites trust in the DSS. However, little focus has been on the development of methods that establish and...

Getting Acquainted for a Long-Term Child-Robot Interaction

We are developing a social robot that should autonomously interact long-term with pediatric oncology patients. The child and the robot need to get acquainted with one another before a long-term interaction can take place. We designed five interaction design patterns and two sets of robot behaviors to structure a getting acquainted interaction....

Expectation management in child-robot interaction

Children are eager to anthropomorphize (ascribe human attributes to) social robots. As a consequence they expect a more unconstrained, substantive and useful interaction with the robot than is possible with the current state-of-the art. In this paper we reflect on several of our user studies and investigate the form and role of expectations in...

Personalised self-explanation by robots: The role of goals versus beliefs in robot-action explanation for children and adults

A good explanation takes the user who is receiving the explanation into account. We aim to get a better understanding of user preferences and the differences between children and adults who receive explanations from a robot. We implemented a Nao-robot as a belief-desire-intention (BDI)-based agent and explained its actions using two different...

Retrieving relevant and interesting tweets during live television broadcasts

The use of social TV applications to enhance the experience of live event broadcasts has become an increasingly common practice. An event profile, defined as a set of keywords relevant to an event, can help to track messages related to these events on social networks. We propose an event profiler that retrieves relevant and interesting tweets in...

The perception of visual uncertainty representation by non-experts

We tested how non-experts judge point probability for seven different visual representations of uncertainty, using a case from an unfamiliar domain. Participants (n = 140) rated the probability that the boundary between two earth layers passed through a given point, for seven different visualizations of the positional uncertainty of the boundary...

Improving service matching and selection in ubiquitous computingenvironments: A user study

In large ubiquitous computing environments it is hard for users to identify and activate the electronic services that match their needs. This user study compares the newly developed service matcher system with a conventional system for identifying and selecting appropriate services. The study addresses human factors issues such as usability,...