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Project Name: Social Engagement with Robots and Agents
Abbreviation: SERA Start date:
January 1, 2009 End date:
December 31, 2010 Project Description:
Getting people to engage with robotic and virtual artifacts is easy,
but keeping them engaged over time is hard: robots and agents lack
some fundamental capabilities which can be summarized as
sociability. Sociability involves perceptiveness of and responsiveness
to individuals' and groups'
needs, moods, habits, situations, cultural background, social norms
and conventions. The research
community has realized the problem, but approaches, so far, have been
dispersed and disjoint. If
robots and agents are to become companions in people’s lives, with
assistive, coaching, monitoring,
or educational roles, they will have to blend into these lives seamlessly.
SERA is innovative in that it addresses sociability holistically, by
advancing knowledge about what
sociability in robots and agents entails, by developing methodology to
analyze and evaluate it, and
by making available research resoures and platforms. SERA will, to
this purpose, undertake reallife
extended field studies of users’ engagement with robotic devices.
Sociablity has also to be built into robot and agent architectures
from scratch. The goal here is to
research and to implement an architecture that caters for both
background (cultural, normative etc.)
and situational individual (theory of mind, adaptivity,
responsiveness) practices and needs of users,
with the guiding principle of pervasive affectivity. Assistive robots
and agents who are to become
true companions, e.g. for elderly or homebound people, have to be
versatile in functionality and
identity (style, personality) depending on the service they are
required to deliver, such as (reactive)
social mediators, as (in turn reactive and proactive) information
assistants, or as (proactive) coaches
or monitors e.g. with health-related tasks. SERA will develop pilots
of such intertwined interactive
service applications for a robotic device.
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The following HMI-member(s) is/are coordinator of this Project
Dirk Heylen
Here you can find the publications
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