Tag: HRI

New HRI Podcast episode

My sabbatical allows me to focus on the HRI Podcast. Here is another episode:

The One About Ethics

Robots are not just machines. We treat them as if they were somewhat like humans, including applying moral standards and expectations to them. Our behavior towards robots matters. The way we treat them reveals much about ourselves. In today’s episode, we will talk about how being nice is not the opposite of being cruel to them. I invited Bob Douglas and Mary Blossom from the AI Research Institute to introduce us to the topic. They agreed to produce a short podcast dialogue to get us started. I then discussed their introduction with Michael-John Turp and Minyi Wang.

Peer Review Review

In October 2023 I had the privilege to talk at the Nerd Night in Christchurch. This event series operates at the intersection of comedy, popular culture and science. I talked about my adventures in exploring the peer review process. Some of them to the annoyance of my fellow scientists, conference organizers and predatory publishers. But always with a nod to comic effect and a focus on the overcompetitive beast we call academia.

I also published this event on the HRI Podcast.

The Dorian Gray Refutation

The limitations of theories

I finally published an article with a title that could be from The Big Bang Theory: The Dorian Gray Refutation. It is an open peer commentary for the article “Social robots as depictions of social agents” in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal. Here is the abstract:

Theories are an integral part of the scientific endeavour. The target article proposes interesting ideas for a theory on human–robot interaction but lacks specificity that would enable us to properly test this theory. No empirical data are yet available to determine its predictive power.