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Striking the right balance between robot autonomy and human control is a core challenge in social robotics, in both technical and ethical terms. On the one hand, extended robot autonomy offers the potential for increased human productivity and for the off-loading of physical and cognitive tasks. On the other hand, making the most of human technical and social expertise, as well as maintaining accountability, is highly desirable. This is particularly relevant in domains such as medical therapy and education, where social robots hold substantial promise, but where there is a high cost to poorly performing autonomous systems, compounded by ethical concerns. We present a field study in which we evaluate SPARC (supervised progressively autonomous robot competencies), an innovative approach addressing this challenge whereby a robot progressively learns appropriate autonomous behavior from in situ human demonstrations and guidance. Using online machine learning techniques, we demonstrate that the robot could effectively acquire legible and congruent social policies in a high-dimensional child-tutoring situation needing only a limited number of demonstrations while preserving human supervision whenever desirable. By exploiting human expertise, our technique enables rapid learning of autonomous social and domain-specific policies in complex and nondeterministic environments. Last, we underline the generic properties of SPARC and discuss how this paradigm is relevant to a broad range of difficult human-robot interaction scenarios.

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Historical data provides observational information crucial to our understanding of the evolution of geophysical processes. However, there is a gap between predigital age observations, which are typically handwritten, and data that is discoverable and analysable. The data rescue protocols here address this gap, covering the information lifecycle from handwritten register pages to transcription‐ready content, describing the historical data, the database design for the data rescue, and the development of an application design to transcribe the meteorological information directly from an image file to the database. The preparatory steps necessary to organize, curate, image, and structure the meteorological information, prior to transcribing the historical data, are outlined here in an integrated methodology. The initial organization, the development of an image file nomenclature to link the rescued data to the original source, and the description of a metadata schema to optimize the transcription application are all vital to the process of ensuring traceability and transparency in the data rescue process. Taken together, these steps describe best practices guidelines for similar projects. Although we designed the methodology and application to be used in any data rescue context, our particular concern was to accommodate the needs of citizen scientists. We thus focused on making our application easily maintained, flexible, direct to database, clear, and simple to use. Open Practices This article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://citsci.geog.mcgill.ca. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

The last few decades have seen widespread advances in technological means to characterise observable aspects of human behaviour such as gaze or posture. Among others, these developments have also led to significant advances in social robotics. At the same time, however, social robots are still largely evaluated in idealised or laboratory conditions, and it remains unclear whether the technological progress is sufficient to let such robots move “into the wild”. In this paper, we characterise the problems that a social robot in the real world may face, and review the technological state of the art in terms of addressing these. We do this by considering what it would entail to automate the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Just as for social robotics, ASD diagnosis fundamentally requires the ability to characterise human behaviour from observable aspects. However, therapists provide clear criteria regarding what to look for. As such, ASD diagnosis is a situation that is both relevant to real-world social robotics and comes with clear metrics. Overall, we demonstrate that even with relatively clear therapist-provided criteria and current technological progress, the need to interpret covert behaviour cannot yet be fully addressed. Our discussions have clear implications for ASD diagnosis, but also for social robotics more generally. For ASD diagnosis, we provide a classification of criteria based on whether or not they depend on covert information and highlight present-day possibilities for supporting therapists in diagnosis through technological means. For social robotics, we highlight the fundamental role of covert behaviour, show that the current state-of-the-art is unable to characterise this, and emphasise that future research should tackle this explicitly in realistic settings.

In recent years, the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has seen an increasing demand for technologies that can recognize and adapt to human behaviors and internal states (e.g., emotions and intentions). Psychological research suggests that human movements are important for inferring internal states. There is, however, a need to better understand what kind of information can be extracted from movement data, particularly in unconstrained, natural interactions. The present study examines which internal states and social constructs humans identify from movement in naturalistic social interactions. Participants either viewed clips of the full scene or processed versions of it displaying 2D positional data. Then, they were asked to fill out questionnaires assessing their social perception of the viewed material. We analyzed whether the full scene clips were more informative than the 2D positional data clips. First, we calculated the inter-rater agreement between participants in both conditions. Then, we employed machine learning classifiers to predict the internal states of the individuals in the videos based on the ratings obtained. Although we found a higher inter-rater agreement for full scenes compared to positional data, the level of agreement in the latter case was still above chance, thus demonstrating that the internal states and social constructs under study were identifiable in both conditions. A factor analysis run on participants' responses showed that participants identified the constructs interaction imbalance, interaction valence and engagement regardless of video condition. The machine learning classifiers achieved a similar performance in both conditions, again supporting the idea that movement alone carries relevant information. Overall, our results suggest it is reasonable to expect a machine learning algorithm, and consequently a robot, to successfully decode and classify a range of internal states and social constructs using low-dimensional data (such as the movements and poses of observed individuals) as input.

This article presents a discussion of the importance of power analyses, providing an overview of when power analyses should be run in the context of the field of Human-Robot Interaction, as well as some examples of how to perform a power analysis. This work was motivated by the observation that the majority of papers published in the proceedings of recent HRI conferences did not report conducting a power analysis; an observation that has concerning implications for many conclusions drawn by these studies. This work is intended to raise awareness and encourage researchers to conduct power analyses when designing research studies using human participants.

The Neural Engineering Framework (Eliasmith & Anderson, 2003) is a long-standing method for implementing high-level algorithms constrained by low-level neurobiological details. In recent years, this method has been expanded to incorporate more biological details and applied to new tasks. This paper brings together these ongoing research strands, presenting them in a common framework. We expand on the NEF’s core principles of (a) specifying the desired tuning curves of neurons in different parts of the model, (b) defining the computational relationships between the values represented by the neurons in different parts of the model, and (c) finding the synaptic connection weights that will cause those computations and tuning curves. In particular, we show how to extend this to include complex spatiotemporal tuning curves, and then apply this approach to produce functional computational models of grid cells, time cells, path integration, sparse representations, probabilistic representations, and symbolic representations in the brain.