Search

Introduction\ud \ud Socially assistive robots are devices designed to aid users through social interaction and companionship. Social robotics promise to support cognitive health and aging in place for older adults with and without dementia, as well as their care partners. However, while new and more advanced social robots are entering the commercial market, there are still major barriers to their adoption, including a lack of emotional alignment between users and their robots. Affect Control Theory (ACT) is a framework that allows for the computational modeling of emotional alignment between two partners.\ud \ud \ud \ud Methods\ud \ud We conducted a Canadian online survey capturing attitudes, emotions, and perspectives surrounding pet-like robots among older adults (n = 171), care partners (n = 28), and persons living with dementia (n = 7).\ud \ud \ud \ud Results\ud \ud We demonstrate the potential of ACT to model the emotional relationship between older adult users and three exemplar robots. We also capture a rich description of participants’ robot attitudes through the lens of the Technology Acceptance Model, as well as the most important ethical concerns around social robot use.\ud \ud \ud \ud Conclusions\ud \ud Findings from this work will support the development of emotionally aligned, user-centered robots for older adults, care partners, and people living with dementia.

Item does not contain fulltext One of the objectives of artificial intelligence is to build decision-support models for systems that evolve over time and include several types of uncertainty. Dynamic limited-memory influence diagrams (DLIMIDs) are a new type of model proposed recently for this kind of problems. DLIMIDs are similar to other models in assuming a multi-stage process that satisfies the Markov property, i.e., that the future is independent of the past given the current state. The main difference with those models is the restriction of limited memory, which means that the decision maker must make a choice based only on recent observations, but this limitation can be circumvented by the use of memory variables. We present several algorithms for evaluating DLIMIDs, show a real-world model for a medical problem, and compare DLIMIDs with related formalisms, such as LIMIDs, dynamic influence diagrams, and POMDPs.

Notions of identity and of the self have long been studied in social psychology and sociology as key guiding elements of social interaction and coordination. In the AI of the future, these notions will also play a role in producing natural, socially appropriate artificially intelligent agents that encompass subtle and complex human social and affective skills. We propose here a Bayesian generalization of the sociological affect control theory of self as a theoretical foundation for socio-affectively skilled artificial agents. This theory posits that each human maintains an internal model of his or her deep sense of "self" that captures their emotional, psychological, and socio-cultural sense of being in the world. The "self" is then externalised as an identity within any given interpersonal and institutional situation, and this situational identity is the person's local (in space and time) representation of the self. Situational identities govern the actions of humans according to affect control theory. Humans will seek situations that allow them to enact identities consistent with their sense of self. This consistency is cumulative over time: if some parts of a person's self are not actualized regularly, the person will have a growing feeling of inauthenticity that they will seek to resolve. In our present generalisation, the self is represented as a probability distribution, allowing it to be multi-modal (a person can maintain multiple different identities), uncertain (a person can be unsure about who they really are), and learnable (agents can learn the identities and selves of other agents). We show how the Bayesian affect control theory of self can underpin artificial agents that are socially intelligent.

Although activity recognition is an active area of research no common benchmark for evaluating the performance of activity recognition methods exists. In this chapter we present the state of the art probabilistic models used in activity recognition and show their performance on several real world datasets. Our results can be used as a baseline for comparing the performance of other pattern recognition methods (both probabilistic and non-probabilistic). The datasets used in this chapter are made public, together with the source code of the probabilistic models used.

This book consists of a number of chapters addressing different aspects of activity recognition, roughly in three main categories of topics. The first topic will be focused on activity modeling, representation and reasoning using mathematical models, knowledge representation formalisms and AI techniques. The second topic will concentrate on activity recognition methods and algorithms. Apart from traditional methods based on data mining and machine learning, we are particularly interested in novel approaches, such as the ontology-based approach, that facilitate data integration, sharing and automatic/automated processing. In the third topic we intend to cover novel architectures and frameworks for activity recognition, which are scalable and applicable to large scale distributed dynamic environments. In addition, this topic will also include the underpinning technological infrastructure, i.e. tools and APIs, that supports function/capability sharing and reuse, and rapid development and deployment of technological solutions. The fourth category of topic will be dedicated to representative applications of activity recognition in intelligent environments, which address the life cycle of activity recognition and their use for novel functions of the end-user systems with comprehensive implementation, prototyping and evaluation. This will include a wide range of application scenarios, such as smart homes, intelligent conference venues and cars.