Tag: human-robot interaction

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.

Keynote Presentation at the JSSR2021 Conference

I gave a keynote speech at the 2021 Joint UAE Symposium on Social Robotics.

I gave a keynote speech at the 2021 Joint UAE Symposium on Social Robotics. This year’s conference took place virtually and we had many exciting speakers. I focused on what roles robots can play during the Covid crisis and why so many social robots fail in the market.

The laws of robotics podcast episode available

A new episode of the HRI Podcast is available:

The Laws Of Robotics

In our previous podcast episode The Good Robot we discussed the difficulty of enabling robots to act ethically. When talking to journalists or policy makers about machine ethics you frequently get the response, well, Issac Asimov already solved that problem with his three laws of robotics. These laws are so seductively simple that most will intuitively understand them. In this episode of the Human-Robot Interaction podcast, Sean Welsh and I will have a close look at these laws and try to understand why barely anybody has ever tried to use them in their robot.