From care practices to speculative vignettes-design considerations for robots in good care.

The care sector has become one of the test beds for developing robotic technologies, which have been promised to mitigate problems with aging populations and labor shortages. Despite these promises, the practical application of such technologies have been met with limited success. Apart from technical limitations, other challenges exist in the way we approach designing these technologies.

Service robots for affective labor: a sociology of labor perspective.

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human-robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and feminist studies of service work.

Modeling Mentor-Mentee Dialogues in Film.

With a view to inform the design of a mentor-like synthetic agent that is to engage in a coherent and consistent in character conversation with human subjects, we conducted a data-driven analysis of verbal communication between fictional mentor and mentee characters in films. While in our earlier work the focus was on the conversation strategies of mentor characters, here we present the extended model, wherein conversation activity of both mentor and mentee characters is accounted for. To examine and to formalize local communication actions and extended goals that the two characters achieve jointly, categories of intents, projects and relationship phases were introduced.

Strategic Talk in Film.

Conversational robots and agents are being designed for educational and/or persuasive tasks, e.g., health or fitness coaching.