@inproceedings {9998, title = {Modelling the Social Buffering Hypothesis in an Artificial Life Environment}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2020 (ALIFE 2020)}, year = {2020}, note = {Download (Open Access)}, month = {07/2020}, pages = {393{\textendash}401}, publisher = {MIT Press}, organization = {MIT Press}, address = {Montreal, Canada}, abstract = {In social species, individuals who form social bonds have been found to live longer, healthier lives. One hypothesised reason for this effect is that social support, mediated by oxytocin, "buffers" responses to stress in a number of ways, and is considered an important process of adaptation that facilitates long-term wellbeing in changing, stressful conditions. Using an artificial life model, we have investigated the role of one hypothesised stress-reducing effect of social support on the survival and social interactions of agents in a small society. We have investigated this effect using different types of social bonds and bond partner combinations across environmentally-challenging conditions. Our results have found that stress reduction through social support benefits the survival of agents with social bonds, and that this effect often extends to the wider society. We have also found that this effect is significantly affected by environmental and social contexts. Our findings suggest that these "social buffering" effects may not be universal, but dependent upon the degree of environmental challenges, the quality of affective relationships and the wider social context.}, doi = {10.1162/isal_a_00302}, url = {https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/isal_a_00302}, author = {Imran Khan and Lewis, Matthew and Lola Ca{\~n}amero}, editor = {Josh Bongard and Juniper Lovato and Laurent Hebert-Dufr{\'e}sne and Radhakrishna Dasari and Lisa Soros} } @article {2016, title = {Making New "New AI" Friends: Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective}, journal = {International Journal of Social Robotics}, volume = {8}, year = {2016}, note = {Download (Open Access)}, pages = {523{\textendash}537}, publisher = {Springer}, abstract = {Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with "robot diabetes" that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes. Robin provides children with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an "Embodied" (formerly also known as "New") Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how "New AI" provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child{\textendash}robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.}, issn = {1875-4805}, doi = {10.1007/s12369-016-0364-9}, url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007\%2Fs12369-016-0364-9}, author = {Lola Ca{\~n}amero and Lewis, Matthew} } @inproceedings {2014, title = {Modulating Perception with Pleasure for Action Selection}, booktitle = {Proc. 5th Annual International Conference on Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2014)}, year = {2014}, note = {
}, month = {11/2014}, address = {Cambridge, MA}, abstract = {Persistence and opportunism are two key features of cognitive action selection architectures. For an autonomous robot that has to satisfy multiple conflicting survival-related needs, it is crucial to persist in the execution of behaviors for long enough to get sufficient benefit. Persistence is important to avoid what is known as the "dithering" problem, which occurs when a robot keeps switching between trying to satisfy two needs without satisfying either of them enough to guarantee survival. Opportunism concerns the initiation of actions, and occurs when an agent chooses to consume a resource that might not satisfy its most pressing need, but which is available now and might not be available later. The degree to which a robot should show persistence and opportunism depends on multiple factors; we could generally say that persistence leads to a more "conservative" action selection behavior and opportunism to a more "risky" one.}, author = {Lewis, Matthew and Lola Ca{\~n}amero} } @article {2012, title = {Multimodal Child-Robot Interaction: Building Social Bonds}, journal = {Journal of Human-Robot Interaction}, volume = {1}, year = {2012}, note = {Download (Open Access)}, pages = {33{\textendash}53}, abstract = {For robots to interact effectively with human users they must be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social context. The Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction (ALIZ-E) project focuses on the design of long-term, adaptive social interaction between robots and child users in real-world settings. In this paper, we report on the iterative approach taken to scientific and technical developments toward this goal: advancing individual technical competencies and integrating them to form an autonomous robotic system for evaluation {\textquotedblleft}in the wild.{\textquotedblright} The first evaluation iterations have shown the potential of this methodology in terms of adaptation of the robot to the interactant and the resulting influences on engagement. This sets the foundation for an ongoing research program that seeks to develop technologies for social robot companions.}, doi = {10.5898/JHRI.1.2.Belpaeme}, url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3109688.3109691}, author = {Tony Belpaeme and Paul E. Baxter and Robin Read and Rachel Wood and Cuay{\'a}huitl, Heriberto and Kiefer, Bernd and Racioppa, Stefania and Kruijff-Korbayov{\'a}, Ivana and Athanasopoulos, Georgios and Valentin Enescu and Rosemarijn Looije and Mark A. Neerincx and Yiannis Demiris and Raquel Ros-Espinoza and Aryel Beck and Lola Ca{\~n}amero and Lewis, Matthew and Baroni, Ilaria and Nalin, Marco and Cosi, Piero and Giulio Paci and Tesser, Fabio and Sommavilla, Giacomo and Remi Humbert} }