Social HRI Summer School: talk on experimental challenges

I'm in Aland, Finland, at the moment taking part in the 2nd Summer School on Social Human-Robot Interaction (the first one took place in Cambridge in 2013). We're at the end of the first day, and what a fascinating first day it has been. Great talks from Tony Belpaeme, David Vernon and Yiannis Demiris. Between these I played support-act, and filled a slot in the programme with some background and observations on performing HRI experiments. The title/abstract of my talk:

"Experimental HRI: a wander through the challenges"
Running HRI experiments is difficult. Running HRI experiments outside of the lab, in the real world, can introduce even more difficulties. Having to deal with real people's quirks and foibles just adds to the challenges! However, there is so much of interest in doing just that: the development of better social robots, and to support the creation of robotic assistants and tools that can help people in their daily lives.
In this talk, an overview will be given of some of the constraints and trade-offs that may be encountered when implementing and running HRI experiments, but also of the opportunities that arise, and effects that can be taken advantage of. Examples from Child-Robot Interaction studies will serve to highlight these, including robots to help children learn, and running experiments in schools and hospitals.
Some of these issues may already be familiar or be intuitive, and will certainly be non-exhaustive, but the intention is to outline the basis of a toolkit of experimental HRI considerations that can be thrown at any attempts to release experiments into 'the wild'.

DREAM

At the beginning of this month, I formally started work on the EU FP7 DREAM project (although the project itself started in April this year). Given that ALIZ-E finished at the end of August, this fit very well for me personally, as it means that I am able to stay in Plymouth. It is coordinated by the University of Skovde (Sweden), with Plymouth (PI Tony Belpaeme) as one of seven partners who between us cover a wide range of expertise. There are two standard robot platforms that will be used as part of the project: the Aldebaran Nao (with which I have plenty of experience in ALIZ-E), and Probo (a green soft-bodied and trunked robot developed by VUB), although the Nao will be the primary focus of development.

(From the nice new flashy project website) The DREAM project...

...will deliver the next generation robot-enhanced therapy (RET). It develops clinically relevant interactive capacities for social robots that can operate autonomously for limited periods under the supervision of a psychotherapist. DREAM will also provide policy guidelines to govern ethically compliant deployment of supervised autonomy RET. The core of the DREAM RET robot is its cognitive model which interprets sensory data (body movement and emotion appearance cues), uses these perceptions to assess the child’s behaviour by learning to map them to therapist-specific behavioural classes, and then learns to map these child behaviours to appropriate robot actions as specified by the therapists.

My work on this will be on the (robot) cognitive and behavioural aspects of this goal. While this is a slight departure from my memory-centred work in ALIZ-E, it remains in the context of child-robot interaction, retains a focus on application-focused development (though for autistic children rather than diabetic children), and maintains an emphasis on achieving autonomous operation (although in the context of supervised interactions). There is an exciting programme of aims and goals in place, and a very good group of partner institutions, so I'm looking forward to it!