This book offers the first comprehensive yet critical overview of methods used to evaluate interaction between humans and social robots. It reviews commonly used evaluation methods, and shows that they are not always suitable for this purpose. Using representative case studies, the book identifies good and bad practices for evaluating human-robot interactions and proposes new standardized processes as well as recommendations, carefully developed on the basis of intensive discussions between specialists in various HRI-related disciplines, e.g. psychology, ethology, ergonomics, sociology, ethnography, robotics, and computer science. The book is the result of a close, long-standing collaboration between the editors and the invited contributors, including, but not limited to, their inspiring discussions at the workshop on Evaluation Methods Standardization for Human-Robot Interaction (EMSHRI), which have been organized yearly since 2015. By highlighting and weighing good and bad practices in evaluation design for HRI, the book will stimulate the scientific community to search for better solutions, take advantages of interdisciplinary collaborations, and encourage the development of new standards to accommodate the growing presence of robots in the day-to-day and social lives of human beings.

Designing robots with socio-emotional skills is a challenging research topic still in its infancy. These skills are important for robots to be able to provide not only physical, but also social support to human users, and to engage in and sustain long-term interactions with them in a variety of application domains that require human-robot interaction, including healthcare, education, entertainment, manufacturing, and many others. The availability of commercial robotic platforms and developments in collaborative academic research provide us a positive outlook, however, the capabilities of current social robots are quite limited. The main challenge is understanding the underlying mechanisms of the humans in responding to and interacting with real life situations, and how to model these mechanisms for the embodiment of naturalistic, human-inspired behaviors via robots. To address this challenge successfully requires an understanding of the essential components of social interaction including nonverbal behavioral cues such as interpersonal distance, body position, body posture, arm and hand gestures, head and facial gestures, gaze, silences, vocal outbursts and their dynamics. To create truly intelligent social robots, these nonverbal cues need to be interpreted to form an understanding of the higher level phenomena including first-impression formation, social roles, interpersonal relationships, focus of attention, synchrony, affective states, emotions, and personality, and in turn defining optimal protocols and behaviors to express these phenomena through robotic platforms in an appropriate and timely manner. Achieving this goal requires the fields of psychology, nonverbal behavior, vision, social signal processing, affective computing, and HRI to constantly interact with one another. This Research Topic aims to foster such interactions and collaborations by bringing together the latest works and developments from across a range of research groups and disciplines working in these fields. The Research Topic is a collection of 14 articles that span across five research themes. Three articles co-authored by Terada and Takeuchi, Jung et al., and Kennedy et al. explore the design of “social and affective cues” for robots and investigate their effects on human-robot interaction. Mirnig et al., Bremner et al., and Strait et al. investigate people’s “perceptions of robots” in different settings and scenarios, such as when robots make errors. Articles by Lee et al., Leite et al., and Heath et al. investigate the factors that shape “dialogic interaction with robots,” such as interaction context. The articles under the theme “social and affective therapy” by Rouaix et al., Rudovic et al., and Matsuda et al. report on how individuals from clinical populations, such as those with dementia, autism, and other pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs), interact with robots in therapeutic scenarios. Finally, Miklósi et al. and Durantin et al. offer “new perspectives in human-robot interaction” with a focus on reframing social interaction and human-robot relationships. We are excited about sharing this rich collection with the scientific community and about its contributions to the human-robot interaction literature.

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--

The idea of humans falling in love with artificial beings is not a modern conception. Our relationship with artificial partners has come a long way since Pygmalion and his ivory lover. In recent years, there has been a strong upsurge of interest and discussions in the various aspects of intimate relationships between humans and artificial partners. This interest is evidenced by the increase in media coverage, TV documentaries and films on this topic, as well as the active research efforts within the academic community. This book provides a comprehensive collection and overview of the latest development in the field of intimate relationships between humans and artificial partners, in particular robots and virtual agents. It includes relevant research work undertaken by the authors, the latest advancements in technology and commercial products, and future predictions and insights from leading experts in the area. This book contains an in-depth discussion of the engineering, philosophical, psychological, ethical, and sociological implications of relationships with artificial companions. It also gives a glimpse of some future directions of artificial intelligence, human-computer love and sexual interaction, robotics engineering etc. It is a great resource for researchers and professionals working in these areas. The narrative style of the book also makes it an enjoyable and educational read for everyone.

The two-volume set LNCS 6974 and LNCS 6975 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2011, held in Memphis,TN, USA, in October 2011. The 135 papers in this two volume set presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 196 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on recognition and synthesis of human affect, affect-sensitive applications, methodological issues in affective computing, affective and social robotics, affective and behavioral interfaces, relevant insights from psychology, affective databases, Evaluation and annotation tools.

Affective computing is a nascent field situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence with social and behavioral science. It studies how human emotions are perceived and expressed, which then informs the design of intelligent agents and systems that can either mimic this behavior to improve their intelligence or incorporate such knowledge to effectively understand and communicate with their human collaborators. Affective computing research has recently seen significant advances and is making a critical transformation from exploratory studies to real-world applications in the emerging research area known as applied affective computing. This book offers readers an overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging themes in affective computing, including a comprehensive review of the existing approaches to affective computing systems and social signal processing. It provides in-depth case studies of applied affective computing in various domains, such as social robotics and mental well-being. It also addresses ethical concerns related to affective computing and how to prevent misuse of the technology in research and applications. Further, this book identifies future directions for the field and summarizes a set of guidelines for developing next-generation affective computing systems that are effective, safe, and human-centered. For researchers and practitioners new to affective computing, this book will serve as an introduction to the field to help them in identifying new research topics or developing novel applications. For more experienced researchers and practitioners, the discussions in this book provide guidance for adopting a human-centered design and development approach to advance affective computing.

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale. This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in October 2012. The 14 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on sensing human behavior; social and affective signals; human-robot interaction; imitation and learning from demonstration.

Robots are predicted to play a role in many aspects of our lives in the future, affecting work, personal relationships, education, business, law, medicine and the arts. As they become increasingly intelligent, autonomous, and communicative, they will be able to function in ever more complex physical and social surroundings, transforming the practices, organizations, and societies in which they are embedded. This book presents the proceedings of the Robophilosophy 2018 conference, held in Vienna, Austria, from 14 to 7 February 2018. The third event in the Robophilosophy Conference Series, the conference was entitled Envisioning Robots in Society – Politics, Power, and Public Space. It focused on the societal, economic, and political issues related to social robotics. The book is divided into two parts and an Epilogue. Part I, entitled Keynotes, contains abstracts of the keynotes and two longer papers. Part II is divided into 7 subject sections containing 37 papers. Subjects covered include robots in public spaces; politics and law; work and business; military robotics; and policy. The book provides an overview of the questions, answers, and approaches that are currently at the heart of both academic and public discussions. The contributions collected here will be of interest to researchers and policy makers alike, as well as other stakeholders.