How Convincing is Mr. Data's Smile: Affective Expressions of Machines

Emotions should play an important role in the design of interfaces because people interact with machines as if they were social actors. This paper presents a literature review on affective expressions through speech, music and body language. It summarizes the quality and quantity of their parameters and successful examples of synthesis. Moreover, a model for the convincingness of affective expressions, based on Fogg and Hsiang Tseng (1999), was developed and tested. The empirical data did not support the original model and therefore this paper proposes a new model, which is based on appropriateness and intensity of the expressions. Furthermore, the experiment investigated if the type of emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust), knowledge about the source (human or machine), the level of abstraction (natural face, computer rendered face and matrix face) and medium of presentation (visual, audio/visual, audio) of an affective expression influences its convincingness and distinctness. Only the type of emotion and multimedia presentations had an effect on convincingness. The distinctness of an expression depends on the abstraction and the media through which it is presented.     

Detecting <Emphasis Type="Italic">h</Emphasis>-index manipulation through self-citation analysis

The h-index has received an enormous attention for being an indicator that measures the quality of researchers and organizations. We investigate to what degree authors can inflate their h-index through strategic self-citations with the help of a simulation. We extended Burrell’s publication model with a procedure for placing self-citations, following three different strategies: random self-citation, recent self-citations and h-manipulating self-citations. The results show that authors can considerably inflate their h-index through self-citations. We propose the q-index as an indicator for how strategically an author has placed self-citations, and which serves as a tool to detect possible manipulation of the h-index. The results also show that the best strategy for an high h-index is publishing papers that are highly cited by others. The productivity has also a positive effect on the h-index.     

Accelerating Robot Development Through Integral Analysis of Human–Robot Interaction

The development of interactive robots is a complicated process, involving a plethora of psychological, technical, and contextual influences. To design a robot capable of operating ldquointelligentlyrdquo in everyday situations, one needs a profound understanding of human-robot interaction (HRI). We propose an approach based on integral analysis of multimodal data to pursue this understanding and support interdisciplinary research and development in the field of robotics. To adopt this approach, a software tool named interaction debugger was developed that features user-friendly navigation, browsing, searching, viewing, and annotation of data; it enables fine-grained inspection of the HRI. In four case studies, we demonstrated how our analysis approach aids the development process of interactive robots.     

An electronic museum guide in real use.

Within the Contextual Model of Learning framework, the authors conducted a study with electronic handheld guides at the Van Abbe Museum. The authors offered the general electronic tour using the ubiNext system for the duration of two weeks. This study investigated whether the use of multimedia content would increase the usage of the system compared to only visual content. In addition the authors were interested if the age of the visitors would influence the system's usage. The authors also investigated whether individual visitors use the system more compared to visitors who experience the museum in couples. More than half of the visitors only requested information for five or less objects independently of the visitor's age. Technical problems and usability issues might have caused many visitors to stop using ubiNext. Among those participants who heavily used the system, the display of multimedia content led to an increased usage compared to visual content only. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The fruits of collaboration in a multidisciplinary field

Collaboration between researchers and between research organizations is generally considered a desirable course of action, in particular by some funding bodies. However, collaboration within a multidisciplinary community, such as the Computer–Human Interaction (CHI) community, can be challenging. We performed a bibliometric analysis of the CHI conference proceedings to determine if papers that have authors from different organization or countries receive more citations than papers that are authored by members of the same organization. There was no significant difference between these three groups, indicating that there is no advantage for collaboration in terms of citation frequency. Furthermore, we tested if papers written by authors from different organizations or countries receive more best paper awards or at least award nominations. Papers from only one organization received significantly fewer nominations than collaborative papers.     

The influence of people’s culture and prior experiences with Aibo on their attitude towards robots

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude.     

Document analysis-from pixels to contents

The authors present a conceptual framework for solving the task of document analysis, which, in essence, consists in the conversion of the document's pixel representation into an equivalent knowledge network representation holding the document's content and layout. Starting on the pixel level, the formation of elementary geometric objects on which layout analysis as well as the definition of character objects is based is described. Character recognition accomplishes the mapping from geometric object to character meaning in ASCII representation. On the next level of abstraction words are formed and verified by contextual processing. Modeled knowledge about complete documents and about how their constituents are related to the application forms the highest level of abstraction. The various problems arising at each stage are discussed. The dependencies between the different levels are exemplified and technical solutions put forward