Ideas for projects

21 outubro 2019, 15:51 Ana Paiva

Dear students,
Here are some ideas for projects. We can get inspiration in them and we will discuss it on Wednesday so that we can agree the type of project you will be doing.

 1.     Proposal: “STOP, Don’t do it!”

Main idea to study: When do people interrupt a robot? Scenario: two robots are doing a task together (can be cosmo something similar). The user is monitoring the task and can interrupt whenever he/she wants. So, the group of three, the user decides when the interrupt the others...

2.     Proposal. “Tell me what to do!

Main idea of the study: What people do when left alone with a robot (Vizzy) that does something they don’t understand, and is doing it badly. Do they help it?

What is the robot dopes nothing? Will they do the task themselves? Will the interact with the robot? When does intentionality comes into place?

3.     Proposal: Shall I trust the robot?

Main idea of the work: a person and a robot are doing a collaborative task. At some point the robot gives a “bad” instruction to the person. Do people follow that bad instruction? What is the robot is framed differently (as very competent or very incompetent)? Do people “overtrust” technology? What If we say that it is a very new algorithm of deep learning that is guiding the playing of the robot?

4.     Proposal: my robotic pet companion.

Study people’s responses to a “pet” robot. Ask people to take the robot home and what their pets play with the robot and report back…

5.     Proposal: Robots Watching Other Robots Being Mistreated
Have one or two robots and one or more participants watching videos together about robots being destroyed or mistreated. The manipulation would consist in changing the emotional reaction of the robots (negative, neutral, positive) and see how it would affect the way people responded emotionally to the same videos. Additionally, one could also test a priming effect in which before watching the videos the robots and the participants worked as a team.

Then, in one condition, participant would watch the videos together with the robots and then played the For the Planet game and in another condition the participants would watch the same video alone and only then played For the Planet. My hypothesis is that the act of watching a video together about climate change in which the robots reacted emotionally would lead to a higher degree of collaboration as compared to the condition in which participants watch the video on their own.

6.     Star Member effect: I’m a star!

Study what happens when a robot is a star performer in a team. Imagine playing with a robot that is super good at playing (for example, a simple game of coins). People will be able to play with a good robot, or with another robot that is not so good. So, how does the team respond? Do they like the robot more (the most competent)? Does the performance of the other members of the team increase?

7.     Promoting Prosociality From Inside or Outside The Team:

The idea is that one robot criticises the members of a team playing a public goods game. We have two conditions. The robot is a member of the team. And the robot criticising is outside of the team. How do people respond to the criticism when the robots belong to either  In-group or outgroup.

8.     Tell a Story to and with a robot

The idea is that a person and a robot tell a story together.  

9.     Proposal: Help me find my Way!

Main Idea: (a) Cozmo robot is lost in a maze and needs to find its way out, while finding the pieces of its friend along the way. (b) Cozmo is in a maze and can only exit the maze after collecting certain number of points in limited number of moves. In this maze the roads are directional and moving in the opposite direction have a penalty of losing the points. People will collaborate with the robots by guiding them to achieve its goal, both by taking the perspective of the robot, or not.