It seems to be that this coronavirus will be around for a while. Although we should take precautions, we can not stop producing. We produce we grow. This is same for the academia, too. The epidemic might have slowed the academic work, but still, people continue to create and share. Recently I joined an online conference through Zoom and Discord. You all know Zoom, and if you are a gamer you also know Discord. It is a popular group chatting application, was originally made for gamers but it provides community and a place to share your work for everyone.
So the conference I joined is the 12th International Conference on Social Robotics. It was planning to hold this conference at Colorado School of Mines, but unfortunately, we had to run it online. It was bad luck for me as I am an Oredigger. Anyway, from my perspective online conference has some cons and pros.
Pros; at least you have a place to share your work. It provides a stable infrastructure for videos and talking. You can jump around and ask questions, watch videos and etc easily.
Cons; as one can expect, the lack of motivation & eye contact, and chit-chat affect the conference badly. Sometimes it is hard to understand the topic since conveying the information all online is not that much easy.
I did take a look at two academic works. The first one is “Excuse Me, Robot: Impact of Polite Robot Wakewords on Human-Robot Politeness”, which is interesting as much as it sounds. I had a chance to participate in one experiment of the work, so it is very exciting to see the results. Basically, the main goal of the work is; trying to find is there any effect of the words that we are using as wakeup words for robots in our daily life when were are talking with another human being. It might be hard to summarize in one sentence. So, do not blame me. For example, we all know that we can wake-up Siri by means of saying “Hey Siri”. So think about, do you speak politely with Siri when you ask something? Does it matter? If you speak direct and impolite with Siri and then you continue to speak with your friend immediately after that, can your impoliteness to Siri affect your way of talking with your friend? Or even your way of thinking? These are all good questions. The work does not go that far but still try to answer most of those questions. In the experiment, a group has been told to wake-up a robot with a direct and impolite phrase while another group has been told on the contrary. Later on, each group participates with humans(pizza delivery person in the scenario), and their politeness has been calculated based on their words in the interaction. Finally, in the work, it has been reviewed that politeness & impoliteness somehow pass through our interaction with other humans. Sometimes, I don't bother myself with results since asking questions always more fun. Furthermore, results tend to change over time and design. Still, the results show that wake-up words do affect our way of speaking with robots and humans but in a very limited way. The data support that idea very weakly. It seems that the experiment needs more participants and data to able to conclude that wake-up words have a significant effect. So, from my perspective, it is a good experience and brainstorming but further investigation is needed to say something.
The other conference paper that grabs my attention is “Engagement and Mind Perception Within Human-Robot Interaction: A Comparision Between Elderly and Young Adults”. Nice, right? The study focuses on these questions; what is the difference in human-robot interaction when it comes to age and how senior citizens and young adults interpret robots’ signals like facial expressions, posture, speech, and laughter. Results show that elderly people have significantly lower engagement with robots. Also, it is stated that this result has a positive correlation with elderly people’s perception of the robot's capacity.
Overall, it has been a good experience. Thank you very much for your time if you have read the post to this point. Feel free to share your opinions if you find these types of topics interesting.
