UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents



         "The Goofy Effect: Why We Could Love a Flawed
           Robot but not Trust it with our Lives"

                         Dr. Maha Salem
      (Adaptive Systems Research Group, University of Hertfordshire)

                      1 April 2015 (Wednesday)
                          1 pm -2 pm

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                       Seminar Room D102

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available





Abstract:


How do humanlike communicative behaviours such as gesture and speech
impact human perceptions of a social robot? And what happens when a robot
exhibits some flaws in these or other behaviours while interacting with
humans? Do mistakes made by the robot in collaborative tasks somehow
affect its acceptance or trustworthiness?

In this talk, I will present some of my previous and current work
on social human-robot interaction (HRI) which addresses the above
questions. First, I will introduce some work focusing on communicative
behaviours such as speech-accompanying hand and arm gestures for a
humanoid robot. Based on their evaluation in HRI studies, I will then
highlight how these behaviours may contribute to the robot's likability
and acceptance, as well as to human perceptions of anthropomorphism.

Inspired by these findings, we will move on to further explore the
notion of flawed behaviours in human-robot collaboration and how they
might affect a robot's trustworthiness. Finally, I will conclude by
discussing how the results of my studies could be interpreted in the
context of animation principles by drawing comparisons to Goofy and
other animated characters that gained fame with their lovable flaws.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk