Papers by Kerstin Sophie Haring
Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
In this paper, we examine the risks posed by roboticists' collaboration with law enforcement agen... more In this paper, we examine the risks posed by roboticists' collaboration with law enforcement agencies in the U.S. Using Trust frameworks from AI Ethics, we argue that collaborations with law enforcement present not only risks of technology misuse, but also risks of legitimizing bad actors, and of exacerbating our field's challenges of representation. We discuss evidence of bad dispositions justifying these risks, grounded in the behavior, origins, and incentivization of American policing, and suggest courses of action for American roboticists seeking to pursue research projects that currently require collaboration with law enforcement agencies, closing with a call for abolitionist robotics. CCS CONCEPTS • Computer systems organization → Robotics; • Applied computing → Law, social and behavioral sciences.
During first encounters and short-term interaction with robots, the robot's appearance and in... more During first encounters and short-term interaction with robots, the robot's appearance and initial behavior plays a major role. In this paper we compare the outcome of three human-robot interaction studies using three different robot types in two different countries, Japan and Australia. The participants' perception of an android robot, a humanoid robot and a non-biomimetic robot are compared before and after interacting with the robots. The experimental results show significant differences in the way people perceive the robots based on appearance alone, and based on appearance and behavior after a short interaction.
ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
The creation of information transparency solutions to enable humans to understand robot perceptio... more The creation of information transparency solutions to enable humans to understand robot perception is a challenging requirement for autonomous and artificially intelligent robots to impact a multitude of domains. By taking advantage of comprehensive and high-volume data from robot teammates’ advanced perception and reasoning capabilities, humans will be able to make better decisions, with significant impacts from safety to functionality. We present a solution to this challenge by coupling augmented reality (AR) with an intelligent mobile robot that is autonomously detecting novel changes in an environment. We show that the human teammate can understand and make decisions based on information shared via AR by the robot. Sharing of robot-perceived information is enabled by the robot’s online calculation of the human’s relative position, making the system robust to environments without external instrumentation such as GPS. Our robotic system performs change detection by comparing curre...
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience
Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an innovative and promising neuroimaging modalit... more Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an innovative and promising neuroimaging modality for studying brain activity in real-world environments. While fNIRS has seen rapid advancements in hardware, software, and research applications since its emergence nearly 30 years ago, limitations still exist regarding all three areas, where existing practices contribute to greater bias within the neuroscience research community. We spotlight fNIRS through the lens of different end-application users, including the unique perspective of a fNIRS manufacturer, and report the challenges of using this technology across several research disciplines and populations. Through the review of different research domains where fNIRS is utilized, we identify and address the presence of bias, specifically due to the restraints of current fNIRS technology, limited diversity among sample populations, and the societal prejudice that infiltrates today's research. Finally, we provide resources for min...
As the presence of robots in everyday life becomes more common, it is expected that interactions ... more As the presence of robots in everyday life becomes more common, it is expected that interactions between humans and robots will include the modality of touch. To date, however, little research has been conducted on tactile interactions between humans and anthropomorphic robots. This study investigates human induced tactile interaction with an android robot. To facilitate data analysis, existing touch dictionaries were revised and adapted for the specifics of human-android interaction. By measuring the participants' personality traits and their perception of the robot, it was found that some tactile gestures are related to participants' personality traits, such as neuroticism and extroversion, and others to robot attributes such as anthropomorphism and animacy. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study to report on how people touch an android robot, and the correlation that exists between the tactile gestures used and the participants' personality traits. Possible implications are discussed.
Frontiers in Neurorobotics
This article provides an overview on how modern neuroscience evaluations link to robot empathy. I... more This article provides an overview on how modern neuroscience evaluations link to robot empathy. It evaluates the brain correlates of empathy and caregiving, and how they may be related to the higher functions with an emphasis on women. We discuss that the understanding of the brain correlates can inform the development of social robots with enhanced empathy and caregiving abilities. We propose that the availability of these robots will benefit many aspects of the society including transition to parenthood and parenting, in which women are deeply involved in real life and scientific research. We conclude with some of the barriers for women in the field and how robotics and robot empathy research benefits from a broad representation of researchers.
Trust in Human-Robot Interaction
Abstract Swift trust is a type of trust that is necessary when temporary group members rapidly de... more Abstract Swift trust is a type of trust that is necessary when temporary group members rapidly develop a working relationship and interact with each other to perform team tasks. These teams are characterized by a lack of prior history of collaboration, experiences, or interactions to judge each other's trustworthiness and little prospect of working together in the future. Due to the current technological capabilities of robots along with the context they are typically used, swift trust is also relevant for human-robot teams. Although swift trust has traditionally been applied to solely human-human teams, there is a need to understand how swift trust is developed for human-robot teams given the proliferation of robots for team tasks. This chapter discusses the contrast of swift trust with more traditional trust conceptions and describes how swift trust can be used to describe the trust relationships formed in current and future human-robot teams.
Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (XR) Technology for Multi-Domain Operations III
2020 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS), 2020
Commercial robotic dogs, such as Sony’s Aibo, have recently been reimagined. Our goal with this r... more Commercial robotic dogs, such as Sony’s Aibo, have recently been reimagined. Our goal with this research was to examine factors that influence human-robot dog bonding. We created a 2x2 between-subjects experiment, by framing the Aibo as a puppy or robot, and by adding fur to the Aibo or not. We hypothesized that bonding would be stronger when the robotic dog was framed to participants as a puppy rather than a robot, and it would be stronger when the robotic dog was dressed in a fur suit. Results showed that participants were less positive toward Aibo when framed as a puppy compared to when Aibo was framed as a robot. Adding fur had a positive effect: Aibo was considered less scary compared to having no fur. In addition, behavioral interaction results showed that asking the Aibo to “come here” was the most popular command with respect to the number of completed actions, failures, and social behavior, and the time spent. Our approach could inform design in a way that integrates dogs into the work force to help people relieve boredom, stress, and help them carry out their jobs more effectively and cost efficiently.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2022
2022 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)
2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), 2020
This work discusses how public trust in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs, or drones) could be increa... more This work discusses how public trust in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs, or drones) could be increased through the implementation of ethical guidelines in drone behaviors. It elaborates the challenges of transparency, ethical decisions in current drone use, and potential ways forward to increase public trust before drones become ubiquitous to people’s daily lives.
2021 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), 2021
Online change detection performed by mobile robots has incredible potential to impact safety and ... more Online change detection performed by mobile robots has incredible potential to impact safety and security applications. While robots are superior to humans at detecting changes, humans are still better at interpreting this information and will be responsible for making critical decisions in these contexts. For these reasons, robot-to-human communication of change detection is a fundamental requirement for successful human-robot teams operating in such scenarios. In this work we seek to improve this communication, and present the results of a study that evaluates the interpretability of autonomous robot-based change detections conveyed via mixed reality to untrained human participants. Our results show that humans are able to identify changes and understand the visualizations employed without prior training. Our analysis of the limitations of this initial study should be constructive to future work in this domain.
2015 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2015
This study focuses on differences and similarities of perception of a small humanoid robot betwee... more This study focuses on differences and similarities of perception of a small humanoid robot between Japanese and Australian participants. Two conditions were investigated: participants actively interacting with the robot and bystanders observing the interaction. Experimental results suggested that, while the robot was perceived as highly likeable, Japanese participants rated the robot higher for animacy, intelligence and safety. Furthermore, passive observations of the interaction (rather than active interaction) resulted in higher ratings by Japanese participants for anthropomorphism, animacy, intelligence and safety. The findings are discussed in terms of cultural background and robot perception.
Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2020
While social robots are designed to engage in socially interactive tasks, they may not always est... more While social robots are designed to engage in socially interactive tasks, they may not always establish the intended social connection. We examined how people's experiences of succeeding in completing these interactive tasks influence attitudes toward social robots. People developed more positive attitudes toward social robots when they completed more tasks successfully. These findings highlight potential constraints of complex interactive tasks increasingly implemented in commercially available social robots. A trade-off may exist between early task success and the sustained training of complex social robots by their human social partners.
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Papers by Kerstin Sophie Haring