UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

                       "Robots in the Mist"

                       Dr. Peter Wallis
                (Department of Computer Science
                    University of Sheffield, UK)


                    5 December 2012  (Wednesday)
                            1 -2  pm


                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                      * * Room C152  * *

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

The SERA project (Social Engagement with Robots and Agents, FP7,
grant agreement no. 231868) put physical robots in older peoples homes
and recorded what happened. But what next?  In this talk I advocate
using the techniques of anthropology to study human-robot interaction.
The Holy Grail of theory-free data analysis is obviously desirable, but
descriptive statistics can only tell us so much.  Interesting results
often occur when theory is slipped in through the back door, but
more often interesting results come from qualitative studies in which
theory explicitly drives observations.  In this talk I will describe
the decisions made in designing our assistive technology and go on to
describe what I think we should do next with our data.

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