Reproducibility in Human-Robot Interaction: Furthering the Science of HRI.

Purpose of Review: To discuss the current state of reproducibility of research in human-robot interaction (HRI), challenges specific to the field, and recommendations for how the community can support reproducibility. Recent Findings: As in related fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and psychology, improving research reproducibility is key to the maturation of the body of scientific knowledge in the field of HRI. The ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction introduced a theme on Reproducibility of HRI to their technical program in 2020 to solicit papers presenting reproductions of prior research or artifacts supporting research reproducibility. Summary: This review provides an introduction to the topic of research reproducibility for HRI and describes the state of the art in relation to the HRI 2020 Reproducibility theme. As a highly interdisciplinary field that involves work with technological artifacts, there are unique challenges to reproducibility in HRI. Biases in research evaluation and practice contribute to challenges in supporting reproducibility, and the training of researchers could be changed to encourage research reproduction. The authors propose a number of solutions for addressing these challenges that can serve as guidelines for the HRI community and related fields.

Witnessing Parental Violence and Cyber IPV Perpetration in Hispanic Emerging Adults: The Mediating Role of Attitudes Toward IPV.

Recent studies indicate that the perpetration of intimate partner violence via cyberspaces (cyber IPV), namely, psychological aggression, sexual aggression, and cyberstalking is high among emerging adults. However, little is known of the risk factors that lead to cyber IPV and far lesser within Hispanic adults. Based on the intergenerational transmission of violence hypothesis, the present study examined the indirect effect of witnessing parental violence during childhood on the three types of cyber IPV through attitudes condoning IPV in Hispanic men and women, separately. Participants were 1,136 Hispanic emerging adults in the age range of 18-29 years (M = 20.53 years, SD = 2.42; 72.5% women, 88% Mexican descent). Over half of the participants (54.2%) witnessed at least one instance of parental violence during childhood. In contrast to women, men were more likely to hold attitudes accepting of IPV and perpetrate cyber sexual IPV, whereas women were more likely to report cyberstalking perpetration. Men and women with exposure to mother-to-father violence held attitudes justifying IPV that was associated with perpetrating the three cyber IPV types in adulthood (women: Brange = .016-.036; men: Brange = .016-.024). No significant gender differences were found in the associations of mother-to-father WPV and father-to-mother WPV on the three types of cyber IPV perpetration. These findings are discussed in the context of Hispanic culture, which has specific implications for cyber IPV intervention strategies.

Facilitating and Inhibiting Factors for Self-Reports of Same-Gender Attraction in Cisgender Heterosexual-Identifying Women and Men.

We sought to identify psychosocial predictors of homoerotic motivations (viz., same-gender attraction) in heterosexual identifying cisgender women and men. We recruited participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk to complete measures of (a) antipathy towards lesbians and gay men, (b) gender role beliefs, (c) felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes, and (d) openness to experience. In Study 1, we found that same-gender attraction was (a) negatively related to antipathy towards same-gender homosexual targets and (b) positively related to felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes for both women and men. In Study 2, both effects replicated for men at p < .05, but women only showed the antipathy effect at p < .05, even while the felt-pressure effect size was similar to that in Study 1. Additionally, men showed a significant negative relationship between openness and same-gender attraction. Thus, both anti-gay attitudes and felt-pressure to conform to gender stereotypes appear to be reliably associated with same-gender attraction.

Understanding the Uncanny: Both Atypical Features and Category Ambiguity Provoke Aversion toward Humanlike Robots.

Robots intended for social contexts are often designed with explicit humanlike attributes in order to facilitate their reception by (and communication with) people. However, observation of an "uncanny valley"-a phenomenon in which highly humanlike entities provoke aversion in human observers-has lead some to caution against this practice. Both of these contrasting perspectives on the anthropomorphic design of social robots find some support in empirical investigations to date. Yet, owing to outstanding empirical limitations and theoretical disputes, the uncanny valley and its implications for human-robot interaction remains poorly understood. We thus explored the relationship between human similarity and people's aversion toward humanlike robots via manipulation of the agents' appearances. To that end, we employed a picture-viewing task (Nagents = 60) to conduct an experimental test (Nparticipants = 72) of the uncanny valley's existence and the visual features that cause certain humanlike robots to be unnerving. Across the levels of human similarity, we further manipulated agent appearance on two dimensions, typicality (prototypic, atypical, and ambiguous) and agent identity (robot, person), and measured participants' aversion using both subjective and behavioral indices. Our findings were as follows: (1) Further substantiating its existence, the data show a clear and consistent uncanny valley in the current design space of humanoid robots. (2) Both category ambiguity, and more so, atypicalities provoke aversive responding, thus shedding light on the visual factors that drive people's discomfort. (3) Use of the Negative Attitudes toward Robots Scale did not reveal any significant relationships between people's pre-existing attitudes toward humanlike robots and their aversive responding-suggesting positive exposure and/or additional experience with robots is unlikely to affect the occurrence of an uncanny valley effect in humanoid robotics. This work furthers our understanding of both the uncanny valley, as well as the visual factors that contribute to an agent's uncanniness.

What we can and cannot (yet) do with functional near infrared spectroscopy.

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a relatively new technique complimentary to EEG for the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). NIRS-based systems for detecting various cognitive and affective states such as mental and emotional stress have already been demonstrated in a range of adaptive human-computer interaction (HCI) applications. However, before NIRS-BCIs can be used reliably in realistic HCI settings, substantial challenges oncerning signal processing and modeling must be addressed. Although many of those challenges have been identified previously, the solutions to overcome them remain scant. In this paper, we first review what can be currently done with NIRS, specifically, NIRS-based approaches to measuring cognitive and affective user states as well as demonstrations of passive NIRS-BCIs. We then discuss some of the primary challenges these systems would face if deployed in more realistic settings, including detection latencies and motion artifacts. Lastly, we investigate the effects of some of these challenges on signal reliability via a quantitative comparison of three NIRS models. The hope is that this paper will actively engage researchers to acilitate the advancement of NIRS as a more robust and useful tool to the BCI community.

Use of dry-milling derived thin stillage for producing eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) by the fungus Pythium irregulare.

This study was to explore the use of thin stillage, a major byproduct in dry milling corn-ethanol plants, for production of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) by the fungus Pythium irregulare. Thin stillage contains various compounds that were ideal for fungal growth. Thin stillage concentration and temperature played important roles in fungal growth and EPA production. When 50% thin stillage was used in a stepwise temperature shift culture process, the cell density reached 23 g/L at day 9 with EPA yield and productivity of 243 and 27 mg/L day, respectively. The fungal biomass contained 39% lipid, 28% protein, 30% carbohydrate, and 3% ash. The fungal culture also generated a nutrient-depleted liquid by removing organic compounds in the raw thin stillage. The results collectively showed a new use of thin stillage by feeding to the fungus P. irregulare for producing omega-3 fatty acids.

Molli: interactive visualization for exploratory protein analysis.

Many programs have been designed to view the 3D structures of protein molecules in 2D. However, three types of linked information haven't been previously defined in a systematic way that highlights the interface design challenge. Specifically, a scientist must have sequence, structure, and homology information in working memory to manipulate and understand a protein structure or related protein structures. Categorizing information types enables the application of classical interaction principles to the design of an intuitive interface for both expert and novice users. In a comparative user evaluation, their Molli system enhances the exploratory process of manipulating proteins of varying complexity by preserving the underlying data's linkages and relations.