As the influence of social robots in people’s daily lives grows, research on understanding people’s perception of robots including sociability, trust, acceptance, and preference becomes more pervasive. Research has considered visual, vocal, or tactile cues to express robots’ emotions, whereas little research has provided a holistic view in examining the interactions among different factors influencing emotion perception. We investigated multiple facets of user perception on robots during a conversational task by varying the robots’ voice types, appearances, and emotions. In our experiment, 20 participants interacted with two robots having four different voice types. While participants were reading fairy tales to the robot, the robot gave vocal feedback with seven emotions and the participants evaluated the robot’s profiles through post surveys. The results indicate that (1) the accuracy of emotion perception differed depending on presented emotions, (2) a regular human voice showed higher user preferences and naturalness, (3) but a characterized voice was more appropriate for expressing emotions with significantly higher accuracy in emotion perception, and (4) participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy with the animal robot than the humanoid robot. A follow-up study ([Formula: see text]) with voice-only conditions confirmed that the importance of embodiment. The results from this study could provide the guidelines needed to design social robots that consider emotional aspects in conversations between robots and users.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is associated with revictimization and sexual risk-taking behaviours. The Internet has increased the opportunities for teens to access sexually explicit imagery and has provided new avenues for victimization and exploitation. Online URL activity and offline psychosocial factors were assessed for 460 females aged 12–16 (CSA = 156; comparisons = 304) with sexual behaviours and Internet-initiated victimization assessed 2 years later. Females who experienced CSA did not use more pornography than comparisons but were at increased odds of being cyberbullied (odds ratio = 2.84, 95% confidence interval = 1.67–4.81). These females were also more likely to be represented in a high-risk latent profile characterized by heightened URL activity coupled with problematic psychosocial factors, which showed increased odds of being cyberbullied, receiving online sexual solicitations and heightened sexual activity. While Internet activity alone may not confer risk, results indicate a subset of teens who have experienced CSA for whom both online and offline factors contribute to problematic outcomes. An observational study of adolescent females’ Internet use reveals how online behaviours coupled with offline psychosocial and contextual factors are associated with subsequent vulnerability to Internet-initiated victimization.

A child maltreatment history is reported more frequently among adults with chronic pain compared with the general population; unfortunately, studies have primarily relied upon retrospective maltreatment reports by adults with chronic pain. This prospective study assessed pain symptoms in a cohort of young adult women with a documented history of child maltreatment, compared with a matched cohort of women who did not experience childhood maltreatment. Young women (N = 477) were recruited between ages 14 to 17 years and followed annually to age 19. Of these women, 57% experienced maltreatment (ie, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, neglect; n = 273) substantiated by child welfare record. Maltreated women were demographically matched to nonmaltreated women, also confirmed by child welfare record. In adolescence, post-traumatic stress was assessed. Women were contacted as young adults (Mage = 24.76; n = 383) and surveyed about their pain experiences, including the presence of pain in the past week, pain severity (0-10), and number of body areas with pain. Mediation path analyses examining the impact of maltreatment and adolescent post-traumatic stress on young adult pain were estimated through structural equation modeling. As adults, women who had experienced child maltreatment reported higher pain intensity, a greater number of pain locations, and were more likely to experience pain in the previous week than nonmaltreated women. Adolescent post-traumatic stress partially explained the effects of maltreatment on pain. Young adult women who experienced child maltreatment are at higher risk of pain, particularly when they also experienced post-traumatic stress as adolescents.

One of the options to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) more accessible, especially for children, is to integrate STEM content into more attractive materials and familiar formats. In this line, by integrating STEM with arts and design, we have created an afterschool program, “Child-Robot Theater” for children in a rural elementary school. We administered two programs over two years and in total 37 children participated in the two-phase program, from which 23 children were included in the analysis of this study. We infused the contents of science, robotics, and computer science with acting, dancing, singing, and drawing inspired by the theater production. Through this longitudinal research, we have successfully demonstrated the informal outreach program with the robots in the wild and achieved improvements in making a robot theater program. After briefly introducing our pedagogical framework and procedure, we delineate potential impacts, lessons, and recommendations for future works. We believe that our efforts could stimulate diverse discussion and practice of using robots and theater for STEAM education across the science, art, and education communities.

In an eight-week STEAM education program for elementary school children, kids worked on musical theater projects with a variety of robots. The program included 4 modules about acting, dancing, music & sounds, and drawing. Twenty-five children grades K-5 participated in this program. Children were excited by the program and they demonstrated collaboration and peer-to-peer interactive learning. In the future, we plan to add more robust interaction and more science and engineering experiences to the program. This program is expected to promote STEM education in the informal learning environment by combining it with arts and design.

Child facial expression recognition plays an important role in child-machine interactions. Recognition methods that were tuned for adults have been used for children in many studies without evaluating the applicability of these methods on children. This paper investigates this problem using a Support Vector Machine classification-based recognition algorithm, which is one of the most widely applied methods. We examined: (1) the difference in facial expressions between children and adults and (2) whether the classifiers trained on one group work for the other. Results show that the classifiers trained on child data were more accurate when tested on child data than adult data and the classifiers trained by adult data were more accurate when tested on adult data than child data. When the training and testing data were from the same group, the classifiers generally performed better for adults than children. Implications and future works are discussed with the results.

STEAM education fuses arts with traditional STEM fields so that the diverse disciplines can broaden and inform each other. Our eight-week STEAM afterschool program exposed elementary school children to social robotics and musical theater. Approximately 25 children grades K-5 participated over the course of the program with an average of 12 children attending each week. The program covered acting, dancing, music, and drawing with the robots in two-week modules based around the fairy tale, "Beauty and the Beast". The modular design enabled children who could come to only a few sessions to participate actively. The children demonstrated enthusiasm for both the robots and the musical theater activities and were engaged in the program. Efforts such as this can provide meaningful opportunities for children to explore a variety of arts and STEM fields in an enjoyable manner. The program components and lessons learned are discussed with recommendations for future research.

Social robots are expected to interact with people in a natural and socially appropriate manner. Often, this will involve communicating by speech. An experiment with two social robots investigated how participants accepted different voices used by the robots and how they interpreted emotions expressed in those voices. A humanoid and a dinosaur robot used recorded human voices and synthesized voices to express seven different emotions while commenting on fairy tales read by the participants. The preliminary results of this study suggest that monotone synthesized voices are not well-suited to emotion-rich interactions, while regular speaking voices and expressive character voices both have relative strengths. We hope that this preliminary study can spark lively discussions on emotive robot voices in the ICAD community.

With the advent of embodied interaction, research on interactive sonification has rapidly been increasing. There have been consistent efforts on the enhancement of motionsound mappings, but still more improvements can be made. The goal of the Musical Utility Software for Interactive Creations (M.U.S.I.C.) platform is to provide a flexible, robust, and easy to use interactive GUI for taking motion data from other devices or software and mapping them to sound or music. In the M.U.S.I.C. platform, users can perform actions when the data meet user-generated conditions. Taking inspiration from the previous motion-sound mapping software, Interactive Sonification Markup Language (ISML), the M.U.S.I.C. structure allows for changes to be both dynamic and static, be it to load the program from launch or to make changes in real-time. Furthermore, any device’s data can be used on-the-fly. After introducing the design and implementation of M.U.S.I.C., we discuss its comparisons with ISML and future plans.

This study tested sexual abuse as a unique predictor of subsequent adolescent sexual behaviors, pregnancy, and motherhood when in company with other types of maltreatment (physical abuse, neglect) and alternative behavioral, family, and contextual risk factors in a prospective, longitudinal study of maltreated (n = 275) and comparison (n = 239) nulliparous females aged 14-19 years old assessed annually through 19 years old. Hierarchical regression was used to disentangle risk factors that account for the associations of maltreatment type on risky sexual behaviors at 19 years old, adolescent pregnancy, and adolescent motherhood. Findings indicate that sexual and physical abuse remain significant predictors of risky sexual behaviors, and that sexual abuse remains a significant predictor of adolescent motherhood when alternative explanatory variables are controlled.

Gaze direction is one of the most important interaction cues that is widely used in human-machine interactions. In scenarios where participants’ head movement is involved and/or participants are sensitive to body-attached sensors, traditional gaze tracking methods, such as using commercial eye trackers are not appropriate. This is because the participants need to hold head pose during tracking or wear invasive sensors that are distractive and uncomfortable. Thus, head orientation has been used to approximate gaze directions in these cases. However, the difference between head orientation and gaze direction has not been thoroughly and numerically evaluated, and thus how to derive gaze direction accurately from head orientation is still an open question. In this article, we have two contributions in solving these problems. First, we evaluated the difference between people’s frontal head orientation and their gaze direction when looking at an object in different directions. Second, we developed functions that can map people’s gaze direction using their frontal head orientation. The accuracy of the proposed gaze tracking method is around 7°, and the method can be easily embedded on top of any existing remote head orientation method to perform non-invasive gaze direction estimation.

The importance of STEM education has consistently increased. Recently, it has been updated to "STEAM", by adding art and design to the equation. To promote STEAM education using robots, we have devised the "Robot Opera" program at a local elementary school, by extending our earlier child-robot theater program. After introducing our pedagogical approach, we outline our ongoing program, composed of four modules: acting, dancing, sonifying, and drawing. We hope this work-in-progress paper can facilitate discussions on how to use robots in informal learning environments.

Given the rapid pace of technical development in the past several decades, many people have fond memories of using devices that are no longer common. We built a prototype of a virtual museum of consumer technologies to explore this with the intention of prompting memories of using past tech in the visitors. The prototype was created using the Janus VR browser and evaluated on a 2D display by 7 young adult users. It successfully prompted memories in all of the evaluators and all users rated the pleasure of touring the museum neutral or better. Future work involves making a more comprehensive museum and exploring better ways to utilize virtual reality for more engaging experiences.

Children in an elementary school afterschool program utilizing the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education paradigm created and acted in short plays with a variety of social robots.

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a rapidly growing area of research and the important factors of the relationship between robots and the people who use them are still being determined. In the present research, we tried to ascertain if robot appearance influenced people's preference for, interest in, and communication with particular robots. To this aim, 18 college students were asked to interact with 5 different robots, answer an investigator-designed questionnaire, and complete an adapted PHIT-40 scale for each robot. Results suggest that regardless of the actual interaction with robots, participants seem to prefer robots that resemble animals or humans over those that are intended to represent an imaginary creature or do not resemble a creature at all. Results are discussed based on social-robot application and design features.

As the technology needed to make robots robust and affordable draws ever nearer, human-robot interaction (HRI) research to make robots more useful and accessible to the general population becomes more crucial. In this study, 59 college students filled out an online survey soliciting their judgments regarding seven social robots based solely on appearance. Results suggest that participants prefer robots that resemble animals or humans over those that are intended to represent an imaginary creature or do not resemble a creature at all. Results are discussed based on social robot application and design features.

To promote STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) education, we conducted a long-term study in an elementary school as part of an after-school program. We worked with small groups of 5 to 7 year old children in hour long weekly sessions for nine weeks. We introduced the children to a variety of robots spanning a wide range of form factors and technical sophistication. Over the course of our study, the children played with the robots, constructed robot models with clay, and wrote and acted in a theater production with robots. We believe that this technique of using robots as actors in children’s theater productions has significant potential for educating children in a number of fields under the STEAM paradigm.

People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are known to have difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, which affects their social integration. Leveraging the recent advances in interactive robot and music therapy approaches, and integrating both, we have designed musical robots that can facilitate social and emotional interactions of children with ASD. Robots communicate with children with ASD while detecting their emotional states and physical activities and then, make real-time sonification based on the interaction data. Given that we envision the use of multiple robots with children, we have adopted a client-server architecture. Each robot and sensing device plays a role as a terminal, while the sonification server processes all the data and generates harmonized sonification. After describing our goals for the use of sonification, we detail the system architecture and on-going research scenarios. We believe that the present paper offers a new perspective on the sonification application for assistive technologies.

In entering the digital realm, older adults face obstacles beyond the more clearly understood physical and cognitive barriers traditionally associated with accessibility. This experience report is a collection of narratives from learners and student tutors who participate in our digital literacy sessions for seniors. We point out ways in which attitudes and motivations, framed by social and cultural factors, can either hinder or assist with adoption of commodity digital technology among older newcomers. We also show how a social-cognitive approach can help learners overcome barriers to digital literacy.