I attended a one-day workshop on Emotional Intelligence and Social Robots at Liris (Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d’information) in Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1. There was not much emotions involved, but most of the talks revolved around social dimension of robotics, such as human-robot interaction, shared experiences, developmental robotics, and Theory of Mind. The discussion about interaction mostly concentrated on gestures, posture, gaze following, instead of more strategic aspects of it in which I would have been interested in, such as coordination, cooperation and competition, and decision making.
Unlike Grenoble, the weather in Lyon was quite agreeable in the morning.
The first speaker, Peter Ford Dominey from INSERM U1208, proposed narrative companion robots as memory prosthesis for memory-impaired people: knowledge from personal background and narratives told by the human partner about new events and experiences are stored forever in the autobiographical memory of the robot, to be recalled whenever the human partner wants or needs them.
The second speaker came from GIPSA-Lab here in Grenoble, Gérard Bailly. He talked about types of human-robot interaction, and presented several methods for acquisition of social behaviors i.e., how abilities are transferred between humans and the robot, such as programming, autonomous (developmental) learning, demonstration, and immersive teleoperation (human acts as a pilot).
Pepper, the robot, performed a dance to ‘Loco-motion’ to our lunch time entertainment.
The first speaker after lunch was Angelo Cangelosi from Plymouth University. He talked about developmental robotics and Theory of Mind.
The last invited speaker, Catherine Pélachaud from University Pierre and Marie Curie, did not talk about robots, but conversational agents and interpersonal attitudes, that is affective styles that spontaneously develop or are strategically employed in the interaction. She also talked about interruptions as organizing force of turn taking; instead of being always disruptive interruptions can also be cooperative as they can create high involvement and promote interest.
The final robot talk was not about social robots but industrial ones. Liming Chen from Liris talked about scene segmentation and grasping: Giving eyes to grasping robots.
Then I was on my way back to Grenoble. The return trip was even worse than coming to Lyon. It took me more than three hours to get to the campus in the morning, when it should have taken less than two. Because of meteorological conditions the train arriving from Lyon was 25 minutes late, so it left Grenoble 30 minutes late (instead of the announced 15 minutes). In turn, it took me four hours to get from the campus to Grenoble. When I boarded the train 15 minutes before its departure time, it was supposed to be on time. 15 minutes after the departure time we were told that the train was canceled, and we should move to the next train that was already waiting.
Just when two train-fulls of people had boarded this single train, the announcement came that the train will not be stopping between Lyon and Grenoble. That worked for my advantage, since 90% of (very angry and frustrated) passengers left and there was plenty of room. This train also left 30 minutes late (at that point I had been sitting in the non-moving trains for 1h15mins). That was not the worst part: the train came to Grenoble via Chambéry, which meant it took two hours instead of 1h25mins. So, the total travel time was 7 hours for a 7-hour workshop of which I missed the first 30 minutes.
After all it was a very interesting day, one way and another, albeit quite tiring.
