Human Creativity Can be Enhanced Through Interacting With a Social Robot: New Directions for NLP, AI, HRI, and Ubiquitous Computing

October 8, 2018
Professor, Peter H. Kahn Jr.

As humans, we create art, music, machines, digital life – new ideas that have never been thought of before, and new ways of doing things. Science depends on the creative mind. So does the economic viability of nations today. Is it possible to design robots of the future so that they can enhance human creative endeavors? In this talk I present on my lab’s research on Human-Robot Interaction that suggests that the answer is yes. I begin by highlighting my earlier collaborative HRI research with Hiroshi Ishiguro and Takayuki Kanda on people’s social and moral relationships with ATR’s humanoid robot Robovie. Then I describe our two studies that show how – through the right design – participants collaborated with Robovie on a creativity task, and that through the collaboration people’s creative productions increased. In all of these studies, the robot was WOZ’d. We were trying to get ahead of where the technology was, so as to help shape new technical work in Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, robot design, and ubiquitous computing.

What I’m excited about in this talk is to share what my lab has been doing so as to see if there are synergies with those of you at MSR for this project space. Namely, I think it’s a terrific application for new technical work because the applications themselves promote not just consumer activity but human wellbeing and indeed human flourishing.

Speaker Details

Peter H. Kahn, Jr. is Professor in the Department of Psychology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and Director of the Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Laboratory at the University of Washington. His research seeks to address two world movements that are powerfully reshaping human existence: (1) The degradation if not destruction of large parts of the natural world, and (2) unprecedented technological development, both in terms of its computational sophistication and pervasiveness. He has over 125 publications in such venues as Science, Developmental Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Environmental Health Perspectives, and Journal of Systems Software, as well as in such proceedings as CHI, HRI, and Ubicomp, and 5 books (all with MIT Press). He has garnered close to 5 million dollars in external funding, much of that from the National Science Foundation for projects focused on human-robot interaction.