Robots will increasingly take on roles in our social lives where they can cause humans harm. When robots do so, will people hold robots morally accountable? To investigate this question, 40 undergraduate students individually engaged in a 15-minute interaction with ATR's humanoid robot, Robovie. The interaction culminated in a situation where Robovie incorrectly assessed the participant's performance in a game, and prevented the participant from winning a $20 prize. Each participant was then interviewed in a 50-minute session. Results showed that all of the participants engaged socially with Robovie, and many of them conceptualized Robovie as having mental/emotional and social attributes. Sixty-five percent of the participants attributed some level of moral accountability to Robovie. Statistically, participants held Robovie less accountable than they would a human, but more accountable than they would a vending machine. Results are discussed in terms of the New Ontological Category Hypothesis and robotic warfare.

Robots are becoming part of people's everyday social lives - and will increasingly become so. In future years, robots may become caretaking assistants for the elderly, or academic tutors for our children, or medical assistants, day care assistants, or psychological counselors. Robots may become our co-workers in factories and offices, or maids in our homes. They may become our friends. As we move to create our future with robots, hard problems in HRI exist, both technically and socially. The Fifth Annual Conference on HRI seeks to take up grand technical and social challenges in the field - and speak to their integration. This panel brings together 4 leading experts in the field of HRI to speak on this topic.

At the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, a provocative panel was held to discuss the complicated ethical issues that abound in the field of human-robot interaction. The panel members and the audience participation made it clear that the HRI community desires - indeed, is in need of - an ongoing discussion on the nature of social responsibility in the field of human-robot interaction. At the 2010 Conference, we will hold a panel on the issues of social responsibility in HRI, focusing on the unique features of robotic interaction that call for responsible action (e.g., value-specific domains such as autonomy, accountability, trust, and/or human dignity; and application areas such as military applications, domestic care, entertainment, and/or communication). As a young and rapidly growing field, we have a responsibility to conduct our research in such a way that it leads to human-robot interaction outcomes that promote rather than hinder the flourishing of humans across society. What does social responsibility within the HRI field look like, and how do we conduct our work while adhering to such an obligation? The panelists will be asked to address this and related questions as a means of continuing an ongoing conversation on social responsibility in human-robot interaction.

This poster suggests a terminological continuum from reflection (push) to invention (pull) for describing children's technologies. Situated as social actors in the zone of proximal development, children's technologies support diverse developmental processes, from the invention sparked by a blank canvas to the metacognitive reflection suggested by maintaining and revisiting a progress portfolio. It is suggested that affect-neutral terminology for situating specific technologies along this continuum will assist designers in their own processes of invention and reflection.

This paper describes the results of a study conducted to answer two questions: (1) Do children generalize their understanding of distinctions between conventional and moral violations in human-human interactions to human-agent interactions? and (2) Does the agent’s ability to make claims to its own moral standing influence children’s judgments? A two condition, between- and within-subjects study was conducted in which 60 eight and nine year-old children interacted with a personified agent and observed a researcher interacting with the same agent. A semi-structured interview was conducted to investigate the children’s judgments and reasoning about the observed interactions as well as hypothetical human-human interactions. Results suggest that children do distinguish between conventional and moral violations in human-agent interactions and that the ability of the agent to express harm and make claims to its own rights significantly increases children’s likelihood of identifying an act against the agent as a moral violation. Author Keywords Children, moral development, personified software agent, social responses to computing, user-centered design, value sensitive design.

We propose that Christopher Alexander's idea of design patterns can benefit the emerging field of HRI. We first discuss four features of design patterns that appear particularly useful. For example, a pattern should be specified abstractly enough such that many different instantiations of the pattern can be uniquely realized in the solution to specific problems in context. Then, after describing our method for generating patterns, we offer and describe eight possible design patterns for sociality in human robot interaction: initial introduction, didactic communication, in motion together, personal interests and history, recovering from mistakes, reciprocal turn-taking in game context, physical intimacy, and claiming unfair treatment or wrongful harms. We also discuss the issue of validation of design patterns. If a design pattern program proves successful, it will provide HRI researchers with basic knowledge about human robot interaction, and save time through the reuse of patterns to achieve high levels of sociality.

This paper presents the results of a panel discussion titled "The Future of HRI," held during an NSF workshop for graduate students on human-robot interaction in August 2006. The panel divided the workshop into groups tasked with inventing models of the field, and then asked these groups their opinions on the future of the field. In general, the workshop participants shared the belief that HRI can and should be seen as a single scientific discipline, despite the fact that it encompasses a variety of beliefs, methods, and philosophies drawn from several "core" disciplines in traditional areas of study. HRI researchers share many interrelated goals, participants felt, and enhancing the lines of communication between different areas would help speed up progress in the field. Common concerns included the unavailability of common robust platforms, the emphasis on human perception over robot perception, and the paucity of longitudinal real-world studies. The authors point to the current lack of consensus on research paradigms and platforms to argue that the field is not yet in the phase that philosopher Thomas Kuhn would call "normal science," but believe the field shows signs of approaching that phase.

No abstract available.