Page 29 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

12 Socially Intelligent Agents

intelligence in order to gain insight for the design of the socially adept artifacts
of the future.
In chapter 18, Cynthia Breazeal discusses her approach to the design of
sociable machines as “a blend of art, science, and engineering”, and outlines
some of the lessons learned while building the sociable ‘infant’ robot Kismet.
With a strong developmental approach that draws inspiration from findings
in the psychology literature, combined with the idea of giving the robot an ap-
pearance that humans find attractive and believable enough to engage in infant-
caregiver interactions with it, Breazeal develops four principles that guided
the design of Kismet—regulation of interactions, establishment of appropriate
social expectations, readable social cues, and interpretation of human social
cues. Those principles provide the rationale that explains the role of the dif-
ferent elements engineered in Kismet’s architecture, in particular of its ‘social
machinery’ and of the resulting behavior.
Chapter 19, by Hideki Kozima, presents Infanoid—an infant-like robot de-
signed to investigate the mechanisms underlying social intelligence. Also
within a developmental perspective, Kozima proposes an ‘ontogenetic model’
of social intelligence to be implemented in Infanoid so that the robot achieves
communicative behavior through interaction with its social environment, in
particular with its caregivers. The model has three stages: (1) the acquisition
of intentionality, in order to allow the robot to make use of certain methods to
attain goals; (2) identification with others, which would allow it to experience
others’ behavior in an indirect way; and (3) social communication, by which
the robot would understand others’ behavior by ascribing intentions to it. In
this chapter, Kozima outlines some of the capabilities that Infanoid will have
to incorporate in order to acquire social intelligence through those three stages.
In chapter 20, Aude Billard discusses how the Piagetian ideas about the role
of ‘play, dreams, and imitation’ in the development of children’s understand-
ing of their social world are relevant to Socially Intelligent Agents research.
Billard discusses these notions in the context of the Robota dolls, a family of
small humanoid robots that can interact with humans in various ways, such
as imitating gestures to learn a simple language, simple melodies, and dance
steps. Conceived in the spirit of creating a robot with adaptable behavior and
with a flexible design for a cute body, the Robota dolls are not only a showcase
of artificial intelligence techniques, but also a (now commercial) toy and an
educational tool. Billard is now exploring the potential benefits that these dolls
can offer to children with diverse cognitive and physical impairments, through
various collaborations with educators and clinicians.
Chapter 21, by Mark Scheeff, John Pinto, Kris Rahardja, Scott Snibbe, and
Robert Tow, describes research on Sparky, a robot designed with the twofold
purpose to be socially competent in its interactions with humans, and to explore
human response to such ‘perceived’ social intelligence, in order to use the