Dec 21 2017
Mortimer and Louis McCallum (Credit: Queen Mary University of London)
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London are studying how humans interact with robots over time and specifically how social media can improve that relationship.
Relationships between humans and robots require long term engagement as well as a feeling of credibility, or social presence, towards the robot. The researchers contend that music can offer this engagement and built a robotic drummer they christened Mortimer. Mortimer can compose music responsively to human pianists in real time.
To help generate a sense of credibility, the researchers stretched Mortimer’s capabilities which now allowed him to take pictures during sessions and post them to Facebook with a supporting comment while also tagging the pianist.
The research details were published in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems.
We’d previously uncovered new and exciting findings that suggested open-ended creative activities could be a strong bedrock to build long-term human-robot relationships. This particular research sought to examine whether the relationships that were initially developed face-to-face, but under lab conditions, could be extended to the more open, but virtual, realm of social media.
Louis McCallum, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London
Facebook friends
During the research, two groups of participants were selected. One group received a Facebook friend request from Mortimer allowing him to tag them in pictures taken during the session. The other group was not sent a request and did not have any contact with the robot beyond the sessions.
The participants attended six weekly sessions in a controlled studio environment and were told to stay for about 20 minutes but could optionally stay for a maximum of 45 minutes.
Mortimer, whose communication is via speech synthesis software, greeted them, and the participants used a tablet to interact with him.
During each session, a picture of Mortimer and the participant playing was captured automatically by the lab’s webcam and a related comment was created. In a few instances, the participants also took a selfie with Mortimer and posted it to their personal Facebook accounts.
From the Facebook data, there were significantly more ‘likes’ for posts created by a user as opposed to one of Mortimer’s posts that the user was tagged in.
One of the most interesting findings was that posts by human participants about the music sessions between them carried significantly more weight within their networks than posts by the robot itself. This suggests a discerning approach to generated posts that is especially relevant in today’s world of social media bots, automated content and fake news.
Louis McCallum, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London
The researchers learnt that the time spent with the robot grew over the study but session length for the group who were Facebook friends with Mortimer decreased over time. They concluded this may be because the participants had more contact with Mortimer beyond the sessions.
Co-author of the study Professor Peter McOwan added: “There are signs of high engagement, such as high self-reported repeat interaction, across all participants that strengthen previous results about the use of music as a good base for improving long-term human-robot relationships. But we found the effects of extending the relationship into the virtual world were less pronounced than expected. This doesn’t mean that virtual interaction doesn’t help, but maybe the quality of the interaction needs to be improved.”
The research received funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
MORTIMER: The drumming robot!