Information environments have the power to affect people's perceptions and behaviors. In this paper, we present the results of studies in which we characterize the gender bias present in image search results for a variety of occupations. We experimentally evaluate the effects of bias in image search results on the images people choose to represent those careers and on people's perceptions of the prevalence of men and women in each occupation. We find evidence for both stereotype exaggeration and systematic underrepresentation of women in search results. We also find that people rate search results higher when they are consistent with stereotypes for a career, and shifting the representation of gender in image search results can shift people's perceptions about real-world distributions. We also discuss tensions between desires for high-quality results and broader societal goals for equality of representation in this space.

As robots become more ubiquitous and capable of performing complex tasks, the importance of enabling untrained users to interact with them has increased. In response, unconstrained natural-language interaction with robots has emerged as a significant research area. We discuss the problem of parsing natural language commands to actions and control structures that can be readily implemented in a robot execution system. Our approach learns a parser based on example pairs of English commands and corresponding control language expressions. We evaluate this approach in the context of following route instructions through an indoor environment, and demonstrate that our system can learn to translate English commands into sequences of desired actions, while correctly capturing the semantic intent of statements involving complex control structures. The procedural nature of our formal representation allows a robot to interpret route instructions online while moving through a previously unknown environment.

Future homes will be populated with large numbers of robots with diverse functionalities, ranging from chore robots to elder care robots to entertainment robots. While household robots will offer numerous benefits, they also have the potential to introduce new security and privacy vulnerabilities into the home. Our research consists of three parts. First, to serve as a foundation for our study, we experimentally analyze three of today's household robots for security and privacy vulnerabilities: the WowWee Rovio, the Erector Spykee, and the WowWee RoboSapien V2. Second, we synthesize the results of our experimental analyses and identify key lessons and challenges for securing future household robots. Finally, we use our experiments and lessons learned to construct a set of design questions aimed at facilitating the future development of household robots that are secure and preserve their users' privacy.

Abstract-Mobile robots that interact with humans in an intuitive way must be able to follow directions provided by humans in unconstrained natural language. In this work we investigate how statistical machine translation techniques can be used to bridge the gap between natural language route instructions and a map of an environment built by a robot. Our approach uses training data to learn to translate from natural language instructions to an automatically-labeled map. The complexity of the translation process is controlled by taking advantage of physical constraints imposed by the map. As a result, our technique can efficiently handle uncertainty in both map labeling and parsing. Our experiments demonstrate the promising capabilities achieved by our approach.

This article surveys the use of natural language in robotics from a robotics point of view. To use human language, robots must map words to aspects of the physical world, mediated by the robot's sensors and actuators. This problem differs from other natural language processing domains due to the need to ground the language to noisy percepts and physical actions. Here, we describe central aspects of language use by robots, including understanding natural language requests, using language to drive learning about the physical world, and engaging in collaborative dialogue with a human partner. We describe common approaches, roughly divided into learning methods, logic-based methods, and methods that focus on questions of human–robot interaction. Finally, we describe several application domains for language-using robots.

This paper presents Gambit, a custom, mid-cost 6-DoF robot manipulator system that can play physical board games against human opponents in non-idealized environments. Historically, unconstrained robotic manipulation in board games has often proven to be more challenging than the underlying game reasoning, making it an ideal testbed for small-scale manipulation. The Gambit system includes a low-cost Kinectstyle visual sensor, a custom manipulator, and state-of-the-art learning algorithms for automatic detection and recognition of the board and objects on it. As a use-case, we describe playing chess quickly and accurately with arbitrary, uninstrumented boards and pieces, demonstrating that Gambit's engineering and design represent a new state-of-the-art in fast, robust tabletop manipulation.

Grounded language acquisition is concerned with learning the meaning of language as it applies to the physical world. As robots become more capable and ubiquitous, there is an increasing need for non-specialists to interact with and control them, and natural language is an intuitive, flexible, and customizable mechanism for such communication. At the same time, physically embodied agents offer a way to learn to understand natural language in the context of the world to which it refers. This paper gives an overview of the research area, selected recent advances, and some future directions and challenges that remain.

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