Social robots are being increasingly employed in service encounters at hotels. This study explored the possibility that social robots can engage in heartwarming interactions with hotel customers. A collaboration design known as 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' , in which social robots compensate for gaps in hospitality through heartwarming interaction, was evaluated. A field test was conducted in which social robots engaged in heartwarming interaction with customers in a public area of a hotel and then collected customers' impressions of the social robots and overall service via a questionnaire and an interview. The results demonstrate social robots' potential for engaging in heartwarming interactions that enhance overall customer satisfaction through the use of the 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' collaboration design. An exploratory analysis suggests that the perceived impressions of the interaction with social robots are influenced by customer gender and the duration of interactions. Furthermore, the results suggest that social robots could be utilized in other roles at hotels, namely effective advertisement through heartwarming interaction and mental support for employees who do not interact with customers.

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Brand advertising is a type of advertising that aims at increasing the awareness of companies or products. This type of advertising is well studied in economic, marketing, and psychological literature; however, there are no studies in the area of computational advertising because the effect of such advertising is difficult to observe. In this study, we consider a real-time biding strategy for brand advertising. Here, our objective to maximizes the total number of users who remember the advertisement, averaged over the time. For this objective, we first introduce a new objective function that captures the cognitive psychological properties of memory retention, and can be optimized efficiently in the online setting (i.e., it is a monotone submodular function). Then, we propose an algorithm for the bid optimization problem with the proposed objective function under the second price mechanism by reducing the problem to the online knapsack constrained monotone submodular maximization problem. We evaluated the proposed objective function and the algorithm in a real-world data collected from our system and a questionnaire survey. We observed that our objective function is reasonable in real-world setting, and the proposed algorithm outperformed the baseline online algorithms.

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This study focuses on the use of humanoid robots in office environments, and investigates whether a robot can maintain the attention of passersby after initiation of face-to-face contact. Drawing attention can be considered as a first step in improving the continuity of use of robots; such continuity is one factor in validating their social acceptance, which must be considered when disseminating robots in offices. In this study, we assume that the robot approaches and greets users in order to make the users aware of its presence and encourage them to use it. In particular, the robots used in this study convey various greetings along with three nonverbal indicators (no motion, random motion, and face-to-face contact) when a passerby at the office is close to the robot. For a one-week period, we validated the social acceptance of the robot by examining how these robot motions influenced the rate and continuity of a passerby's attention. The results revealed that face-to-face contact can draw a high degree of attention, and that the presence of the robot affects the continuity with which attention is drawn. Finally, the paper discusses implications for future robot design, in terms of drawing and maintaining high rates of attention from users.