Antonio CHELLA – 16 septembre 2021
Titre : Robot Inner Speech: A Sign of Robot Sentience?
Résumé:
Inner speech is thoroughly studied in humans and represents an interdisciplinary research issue involving psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy. Inner speech is generally considered tightly linked to self-consciousness. The seminar will discuss the potential of a robot’s inner speech alone and while cooperating with human partners. A cognitive architecture was designed at the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo and integrated with standard robot routines into a complex robot framework. Thanks to the robot monologue, the human partner can easily trace the robot’s internal processes. Moreover, the robot can better resolve conflicts leading to successful goal achievement. The seminar will also present experiments on interactions of the architecture implemented on a Pepper robot by Softbank robotics. Results show that functional and transparency requirements are better met when inner speech accompanies human-robot interaction. Moreover, human-robot interaction sessions were organized to evaluate how inner speech influences human trust in robot sentience, where participants have to set up a table in collaboration with the robot. Participant levels of trust and perception of robot anthropomorphic features increase after experimental interaction with the robot.
Références:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2020.00016/full https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(21)00339-4.pdf https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921889021001238
Bio:
Antonio Chella is a Professor of Robotics at the University of Palermo, Italy and the Director of the Robotics Lab at the Department of Engineering of the same University. He is an Associate Researcher at the Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and an Honorary Professor in Machine Learning and Optimisation within the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester, UK. The primary research expertises of Prof. Chella concern Machine Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Robotics. He is a fellow of the Italian National Academy of Science, Humanities, and Arts. He received the James S. Albus Medal award of the Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (BICA) Society for the outstanding contribution to the science of BICA and for support and scientific achievement of the BICA Society. He is a founder and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness and of the Book Series on Machine Consciousness by World Scientific