Resume of Prof Vanessa Evers' Lecture

MUHAMMAD DAFFA ABIYYU RAHMAN
07211640000010
A digital copy of this resume can be found at http://www.daffaabiyyu.com/2019/11/resume-of-prof-vanessa-evers-lecture.html

This note is taken from Prof. Vanessa Evers' lecture. The lecture entails on the topic of the social use of human media interaction and robotic, officially called human media interaction and social robotics.

To be able to utilize the potential of robotics being used in real-life situations, a multi-discipline team is needed. The utilization of robotics in social life is in line with the desire of making science having actual societal impacts. This means devices developed using science will have social impacts.

It is weird that robots cannot have the ability to dynamically switch their context, and thus it would be imperative to make them have the ability to social programming themselves which allows them to dynamically switch their context to adapt to human lives. The circle is from Detection to Interpretation, to Generation which allows them to adapt their context.

There are five projects explained that involve this social programming capability, ranging from FROG that acts as a museum guide, to DE-Enigma that aims to help autistic spectrum kids to interact with their environment. The first project is the FROG, which acts as a social robot in the wild acting as a guide to people visiting a museum in Spain. This project imposes the challenge of sunlight altering the result of image processing, which is a crucial feature in the project.

The second project is SPENCER, which acts as a guide between gates. This particular robot has the ability to detect which people are part of a group. This detection allows them to avoid crossing through a group that minimizes their intrusion.

The third project is Squirrel. Squirrel is a playing robot that is used to help children learn to tidy places they messed up. This robot has the ability to detect cluttered objects, which is a challenge in image processing and computer vision and asks children to play a game to clean them up. A unique trait of this robot is the ability to adapt the game it gives to children to maximize their social behavior. By understanding collaborative actions, the robot can decide whether the children are collaborating well or not.

The fourth project is TERESA. It is a telepresence robot. The robot allows the elderly to do social engagements with other people. A unique trait this robot has is the ability to detect subtle changes in behavior, and re-adjust once they find a negative social response from their action.

The fifth project is DE-Enigma. This particular project uses a humanoid robot to help autistic spectrum children to adapt to their presence. Due to the user group, it is necessary for the robot to understand non-language signals such as facial expressions. The project has helped therapists in understanding and confirming the process of the therapy of the child, especially when it comes to knowing whether the therapy made some progress or not.

There are several challenges that come from these projects. First, in the energy source department. Having electric as a mandatory energy source is a challenge in terms of battery and wires making the robot size bigger than necessary. Second, there are linguistic challenges such as different languages. Lastly, there are technical challenges, such as facial recognition in real-life scenarios where there are ‘uncommon’ variables get a place to play.