HCC: Small: Social Agents and Robots for Open-Ended Domains

娱乐活动是人类生存的一个基本方面，也是家庭和社会群体中人类状况的一个重要组成部分，它通过增加个人之间的情感来加强社会联系，并作为创造性思维的一种教育形式。尽管从社会学、人类学和心理学中积累了大量关于这种活动的知识，但“游戏”作为一个一流的概念还没有通过计算的视角来研究。当今天的智能体与人类互动时，它们是在结构化的环境中进行的，并且高度依赖于定义良好的目标和/或行为。与此形成鲜明对比的是假装游戏领域，后者涉及在共享的假想第二现实中进行非目标导向的点对点活动，这种活动不断发生变化。假装游戏是一种常见的参与形式，与一系列社会领域有关，例如老年人护理，同伴学习或自闭症谱系障碍儿童的社交技能治疗。PI在这项研究中的目标是向机器人系统灌输程序性和说明性的游戏表征，以便它们能够与人类同伴一起参与此类活动。这项工作旨在发现如何开发具有在非结构化环境中与人类互动、即兴创作和创造能力的类人机器人。这种机器人的能力将培养逼真的感知，社会接受，以及类似于与其他人一起玩耍的陪伴体验。这些代理人将鼓励人们的精神行为和创造力。它们会引发高水平的兴趣、内在动机和积极的影响，进而导致人类参与者更好地集中注意力、学习和个人投资。为了实现这些目标，PI将利用他之前在创造力和认知方面的工作，对参与基于物体的假装游戏的成年人进行研究，以获得对其的正式理解。该团队在以人为本的人工智能和人机交互方面的专业知识，随后将把这些发现应用于制造社交机器人。最终的机器人架构将被评估，看看它如何提高机器人的影响力和社会接受度。更广泛的影响：这项研究将在社交机器人领域创造一个新的学术研究方向，即计算游戏，这有可能为该领域做出坚实而独特的贡献，并改变我们与智能代理的互动方式，从而提高代理的社会价值和被周围人类接受的程度。这项工作将通过实证研究增加我们对人类参与的理解，特别是在假装场景中涉及的知识和社会动态。在这项工作中设计、实施和正式评估的好玩的机器人将告知人机交互社区如何在HRI环境中使用此类活动来增加影响。这项工作也有可能提高那些与社会代理人互动的人的学习和创造力，使计算游戏成为教育的一个有价值的研究方向。该项目将为研究生和本科生的跨学科培训提供肥沃的土壤，并将与科学界共享丰富的互动数据。

Recreational activity is a fundamental aspect of human existence and an important part of the human condition within familial and social groups, where it serves to strengthen social ties by increasing affect between individuals and as a form of education in creative thinking. Despite a sizable accumulation of knowledge about such activity from sociology, anthropology, and psychology, "play" as a first-class concept has not been studied through the lens of computation. When today's agents engage with humans, they do so in the context of structured environments and are highly dependent on well-defined goals and/or behaviors. Contrast this to the domain of pretend play, which involves non-goal directed peer-to-peer activity in a shared imaginary second reality that is continually altered. Pretend play is a common form of engagement that is relevant to an array of social domains, such as elder care, peer learning, or social skills therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders. The PI's goal in this research is to imbue robot systems with procedural and declarative representations of play so that they are capable of engaging in such activity with humans as peers. The work aims to discover how to develop humanoid robots with the ability to engage, improvise, and create with humans in unstructured environments. Such robot capability would foster perceptions of lifelikeness, social acceptance, and companionship similar to the experience of playing with other people. These agents would encourage spirited behaviors and creativity in people. They would elicit high levels of interest, intrinsic motivation, and positive affect, which in turn would lead to better concentration, learning, and personal investment by the human participant. To achieve these goals, the PI will leverage his prior work on creativity and cognition to conduct a study of adults engaging in object-based pretend play to elicit a formal understanding of it in dyads. The findings will subsequently be applied to building social robots that engage, based on the team's expertise in human-centered AI and human-robot interaction. The resulting robot architecture will be evaluated to see how it can enhance robot affect and social acceptance. Broader Impacts: This research will create a new academic research direction of Computational Play within the field of social robotics that has the potential to contribute a solid and unique advance to the field, and also to change how we interact with intelligent agents thereby increasing agents' social value and acceptance by the humans around them. The work will increase via empirical study our understanding of human engagement, and in particular of the knowledge and social dynamics involved in pretend scenarios. The playful robots to be designed, implemented and formally evaluated in this work will inform the human-robot interaction community as to how such activity can be used within HRI contexts to increase affect. This work also has the potential of improving the learning and creativity of those that interact with social agents, making computational play a valuable research direction for education. The project will provide a fertile ground for interdisciplinary training of graduate and undergraduate students, and a wealth of interaction data that will be shared with the scientific community.