The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The power of feedback.

This study emphasizes the need for standardized measurement tools for human robot interaction (HRI). If we are to make progress in this field then we must be able to compare the results from different studies. A literature review has been performed on the measurements of five key concepts in HRI: anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety. The results have been distilled into five consistent questionnaires using semantic differential scales. We report reliability and validity indicators based on several empirical studies that used these questionnaires. It is our hope that these questionnaires can be used by robot developers to monitor their progress. Psychologists are invited to further develop the questionnaires by adding new concepts, and to conduct further validations where it appears necessary.

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Measurement instruments for the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of robots

本文对国际科学计量学杂志《Ｓｃｉｅｎｔｏｍｅｔｒｉｃｓ》１９７９－１９９１年的研究论文内容、栏目、作者及国别和编委及国别作了计量分析，揭示出科学计量学研究的重点、活动的中心及发展趋势，说明了学科带头人在发展科学计量学这门新兴学科中的作用。

国际刊物《Scientometrics》文献计量研究

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Robots are becoming an integral component of our society and have great potential in being utilized as an educational technology. To promote a deeper understanding of the area, we present a review of the field of robots in education. Several prior ventures in the area are discussed (post-2000) with the help of classification criteria. The dissecting criteria include domain of the learning activity, location of the activity, the role of the robot, types of robots and types of robotic behaviour. Our overview shows that robots are primarily used to provide language, science or technology education and that a robot can take on the role of a tutor, tool or peer in the learning activity. We also present open questions and challenges in the field that emerged from the overview. The results from our overview are of interest to not only researchers in the field of human–robot interaction but also administration in educational institutes who wish to understand the wider implications of adopting robots in education.

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A review of the applicability of robots in education

Robots exhibit life-like behavior by performing intelligent actions. To enhance human-robot interaction it is necessary to investigate and understand how end-users perceive such animate behavior. In this paper, we report an experiment to investigate how people perceived different designs of robot embodiments in terms of animacy and intelligence. iCat and Robovie II were used as the two embodiments in this experiment. We conducted a between-subject experiment where robot type was the independent variable, and perceived animacy and intelligence of the robot were the dependent variables. Our findings suggest that a robot’s perceived intelligence is significantly correlated with animacy. The correlation between the intelligence and the animacy of a robot was observed to be stronger in the case of the iCat embodiment. Our results also indicate that the more animated the face of the robot, the more likely it is to attract the attention of a user. We also discuss the possible and probable explanations of the results obtained.

/pdf/does-the-design-of-a-robot-influence-its-animacy-and-484ys98s0o.pdf

Does the Design of a Robot Influence Its Animacy and Perceived Intelligence

Robots can exhibit life like behavior, but are according to traditional definitions not alive. Current robot users are confronted with an ambiguous entity and it is important to understand the users perception of these robots. This study analyses if a robot's intelligence and its agreeableness influence its perceived animacy. The robot's animacy was measured, amongst other measurements, by the users' hesitation to switch it off. The results show that participants hesitated three times as long to switch off an agreeable and intelligent robot as compared to a non agreeable and unintelligent robot. The robots' intelligence had a significant influence on its perceived animacy. Our results suggest that interactive robots should be intelligent and exhibit an agreeable attitude to maximize its perceived animacy.

/pdf/daisy-daisy-give-me-your-answer-do-switching-off-a-robot-kyj9ctogk8.pdf

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do!": switching off a robot

Robots are being introduced in our society but their social status is still unclear. A critical issue is if the robot's exhibition of intelligent life-like behavior leads to the users' perception of animacy. The ultimate test for the life-likeness of a robot is to kill it. We therefore conducted an experiment in which the robot's intelligence and the participants' gender were the independent variables and the users' destructive behavior of the robot the dependent variables. Several practical and methodological problems compromised the acquired data, but we can conclude that the robot's intelligence had a significant influence on the users' destructive behavior. We discuss the encountered problems and the possible application of this animacy measuring method.

/pdf/to-kill-a-mockingbird-robot-2ohzzwthse.pdf

Omar Mubin

Papers

A review of the applicability of robots in education

Does the Design of a Robot Influence Its Animacy and Perceived Intelligence

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do!": switching off a robot

To kill a mockingbird robot

Designing social games for children and older adults : two related case studies