Lars Oestreicher

Cognitive, Social, Sociable or just Socially Acceptable Robots?

Today there is a large movement towards creating social and cognitive robots. Today there is research aiming at using robots as care support as well as social agents introduced in geriatric care and home care. Much of the research is aimed at the development of cognitive and social agents, since robot agents are considered to need ways of interacting with the people in the surrounding areas. In this perspective it is necessary to start thinking of robots not only in terms of social, cognitive or sociable, but also of socially acceptable. What are the requirements for a socially acceptable robot, and which properties in a robot provide for making it more or less acceptable as part of a social environment? In this paper a set of tentative acceptance properties is presented, together with the results from a pilot study trying to assess the importance of some of these properties for the social acceptance of domestic service robots.

Human factors in electronic mail system design

The current paper analyses how human factors aspects and system design aspects may co-operate in the design of a particular application, i.e. electronic mail systems. A review of research on the experience of electronic mail systems is presented, as well as a pilot study covering the experience of mail systems in different user groups. The users were found to differ mainly in terms of the tasks they performed and wanted to perform. It is therefore suggested that a task analysis is essential in system design. Current practice on task analysis is presented, which shows that a more detailed task analysis is needed to be useful. In order to achieve flexibility, the subtasks found should be designed in a modular way. Here the system designer will need different supports. To facilitate co-operation between end-users and system designers some kind of communication support is also suggested.

HCI education in Sweden

HCI is still a rather new subject for Scandinavian undergraduate level studies. Ten years ago only short courses at var-O ious computer science • ~ and system development educations were available. During the last two-three years HCI education has grown rather rapidly through the establishment of minor programs at the smaller universities and with specific profiles at the bigger universities. In 1998 the first Ph.D. in HCI graduated and now an HMI graduate school has been started in Link6ping and Stock-holm. HCI has also been well established as a research activity in Swe-den and is now becoming more and more regular departments at the major universities. Still, education in HCI is varied in content and direction, and this paper describes a first Swedish workshop aimed at reviewing the contents of HCI courses in Sweden. The workshop was initiated through a session where everybody was asked about their expectation on the workshop in the forms of relevant questions to discuss. The initial questions and discussion topics were, in order of appearance: 1. How do you create a balance between redesigning existing arti-facts and promoting new and creative solutions? 2. Exchange experiences concerning different pedagogical approaches to HCI 3. New ways of examining HCI courses 4. What should a basic HCI course contain? 5. What should advanced HCI courses contain? 6. What basic knowledge should we require? 7. How can we introduce practical tasks into a HCI course? Without it taking too much of the time? Using simple and realistic prob-lems? 8. How do you create motivation for the students to take HCI as a secondary subject? 9. Practical issues How do we teach innovation? How do we teach creativity? 10.What can we learn from the game industry? We did not go through the questions in detail but touched upon most of them in the discussion that followed. Through a brainstorming session we attempted to condense a set of what we considered to be typical knowledge that a basic course on HCI should present. We performed an informal survey in which the workshop participants were to choose the five most important subjects and the summary of the votes went as shown in Table 1. The course should comprise 5 points (where 1 point corresponds to approximately one week of work). The number of subjects turned out to be rather limited. This informal survey indicates that cognitive psychology, design princi-ples/processes, interaction techniques, usability, …

Teaching Human-Computer Interaction

Traditional methods of teaching HCI and usability are not as successful and easy as is generally thought. Methods based on traditional software engineering teaching approaches have not provided the answer. This paper suggests an alternative way to approach the teaching of HCI. The method involves what we call the ‘establishment of an HCI mindset within the student’. To successfully implement the approach would require a resource base of suitable HCI material and examples that can be drawn upon. The second half of the paper addresses the issues involved in setting up and developing such a resource base.

Providing for Social Acceptance in Task Modelling for Robots

A proper behaviour of a robot is probably of importance when we consider the possibility of having it accepted by people. For example, it has been shown that erratic or unexplained behaviour tends to be a cause of distrust in the robot. There are several other, more non-technical issues that need to be fulfilled by the robot in order to make it acceptable in society. Even for cognitive, intelligent and largely autonomous robots their tasks need to be modelled. One such task modelling method, task patterns, has been proposed earlier as a language for describing robot activities. In this article it is suggested that the task pattern language can be extended through a framework based on the ideas behind Design Patterns, to also incorporate modelling of task properties that are important to the acceptance of a robot in a social environment.

Finding keys for people with mild dementia : Not just a matter of beeping and flashing

Searching for everyday objects are a frequent activity for most people. Misplaced keys, mobiles and other devices are a source of annoyance, and even more so, if people are affected by memory problems. Searching for objects is a frustrating activity, especially if this is a frequently recurring phenomenon. There are several existing techniques for retrieving objects, but many of them do not use the available technology to the full extent, providing solutions that are almost ”good-enough” but not necessarily useable practice.

Knowledge management for robot activities in a real world context. a case for task pattern analysis (TAPAS)

Knowledge management is used for handling knowledge and activities in real world context. However, knowledge management can also be used for the modelling of robot activities in a real world context. Although robot technology is still under development, Intelligent Service Robots are slowly becoming a reality. The programming of these robots to support a closer interaction with the users is a complex problem including the difficulty of correct modelling of the tasks of the robots. The need for close cooperation between user and robot adds extra complexity, compared to standard models for task modelling. In this paper we outline a representation scheme, Task Pattern Analysis (TAPAS), that is directed towards a notion of activities as rule-based behaviours. In task pattern analysis, the tasks are described in terms of Task Patterns, consisting of a frame rule, and Task Fragments, specifying and constraining the applicability of the rules.

Teaching Human-Computer Interaction from Real World Examples — Furnishing Creativity?

This paper argues that it can give good results to use bad and good design examples when teaching Human-Computer Interaction provided that the examples are elaborated by the teacher in a manner tha ...