On the pertinence of Social Practices for Social Robotics

Aurélie Clodic, LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France
Rachid Alami, LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France
Virginia Dignum, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Agnese Augello, Istituto di Calcolo e Reti ad Alte Prestazioni, National Research Council of Italy, Italy Frank Dignum, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Javier Vázquez-Salceda, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain
Manuel Gentile, Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, National Research Council of Italy, Italy

In the area of consumer robots that need to have rich social interactions with humans, one of the challenges is the complexity of computing the appropriate interactions in a cognitive, social and physical context.

Of course people have managed this complexity for ages already. One of the ways to simplify social interactions is by standardizing them based on particular contexts. E.g. even though greetings have many variations, the patterns they follow are quite standard and used in some form all over the world. At the same time the variations within the physical actions that can be chosen have their own social effect. E.g. boxing a hand instead of shaking it signifies that we are in an informal setting and are peers in this context.

We chose the human use of social practices and its associated theory as a basis for modeling the interactions for social robots. Social Practices describe physical and social patterns of joint action as routinely performed in society and provide expectations about the course of events and the roles that are played in the practice.

We will show how Social Practices can structure human-robot interactions in a way that feels natural to people and can ensure that robots are aware of their own social identities and the identities of others and also be able to identify the different social contexts and the appropriate social practices in those contexts.

Authors

Aurélie Clodic is a research engineer at LAAS-CNRS (Toulouse, France). She received a PhD in robotics in 2007 for which she elaborated and implemented ingredients for human-robot joint activity in several contexts (robot guide in a museum, robotic assistant in the framework of the COGNIRON project) Her research interest includes human-robot collaborative task achievement as well as robotics architecture design (focused on decision- making and supervision) dedicated to HRI. She is the principal investigator of the “toward a Framework for Joint Action” workshop series and is involved in the H2020 MuMMER project as well as JointAction4HRI project.

Dr. Rachid Alami is Senior Scientist at CNRS. He received an engineer diploma in computer science in 1978, a PhD in Robotics in 1983 and an Habilitation HDR in 1996 from Paul Sabatier University He contributed and took important responsibilities in several national, European and international research and/or collaborative projects (FP6, FP7 and H2020 projects COGNIRON, URUS, PHRIENDS, CHRIS, SAPHARI, ARCAS, SPENCER, MUMMER, France: ARA, VAP-RISP for planetary rovers, PROMIP, ANR projects). His main research contributions fall in the fields of Robot Decisional and Control Architectures, Task and motion planning, multi-robot cooperation, and human-robot interaction. Rachid Alami is currently the head of the Robotics and InteractionS group at LAAS.

Virginia Dignum is Associate Professor on Social Artificial Intelligence at TU. Her research focuses on value-sensitive design of intelligent systems, in particular on the formalisation of ethical and normative behaviours and social interactions. She has given keynote speeches on her work at many leading conferences, has chaired many international conferences and workshops. Her publication list can be found at:https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=xJj3UN4AAAAJ. She is Executive Director of the Delft Design for Values Institute, Executive Committee member of IEEE Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous Systems and Director the AI and Robotics MSc program at TU Delft.

Agnese Augello is research scientist at ICAR-CNR. She achieved in 2008 the Ph.D. in Computer Science. She is currently a researcher at the ICAR-CNR (Istituto di CAlcolo e Reti ad alte prestazioni, Italian National Research Council), where is a member of the Cognitive Robotics and Social Sensing laboratory. She is involved in several research projects and she is member of the Program Committee of various international conferences and reviewer for various conferences and international journals. Her research activity deals with the implementation of intelligent agents, able to interact with users to retrieve information, for educational purposes and to provide support in decisional processes. Through the support of the CNR she has been visiting scientist of the Utrecht Research Institute for Information and Computing Sciences. The collaboration, is aimed to the design of cognitive agents for serious games, able to deliberate and dialogue according to the social context.

Dr. Frank Dignum is working on social aspects of software agents with applications in serious gaming, social simulations and robotics. He is well known for his work on norms and other social structures. His latest research focuses on creating new agent architectures to build agents and robots that operate in real-time environments and have to cooperate with humans and other agents. He has organized many workshops and conferences on the topics and given tutorials at most major conferences and summer schools on them. At the moment his H-index is 50.

Javier Vázquez-Salceda is head of the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning group. His research is focused on theoretical and applied issues of behavioural modelling, normative systems, software and robotic agents' autonomy and social control, especially in distributed applications for complex domains such as eCommerce, e-Health, Ambient Intelligence or user-centric solutions for Smart Cities. In 2003 he presented his PhD dissertation (with honours) on social norms modelling, awarded with the 2003 ECCAI AI Dissertation Award. Other awards include the Spanish I3 research award (2011) and the 2013 El Bulli Foundation Hacking Bullipedia Award.

Manuel Gentile's research interests concern technology enhanced learning (TEL). He is actually working on the application of the theory of social practice in the education, specifically to design intelligent virtual agent for serious games. He has been involved in several national and international research projects to design and implement: mobile learning platforms, serious games, systems for collaborative production, sharing and organization of learning resources. He is the scientific coordinator of a research programme in collaboration with the Civico Hospital of Palermo, for experimenting Innovative Technologies for health professionals training and the empowerment of the citizen/patient. Since 2007, he is also Lecturer at the University of Palermo, teaching the course “Advanced Computer Programming Methods”.

Revised 28.02.2024