Seminars

Much of our lives are spent interacting with technology of some kind. Whatever that technology is, knowing why people use it the way they do, and what they get out of it, is valuable knowledge that can inform future developments. The pursuit of that knowledge mostly boils down to asking the question, 'What were they thinking?' Humans are endlessly fascinating beings, sometimes predictable but often highly variable. Indeed, the reasons for such variability can be part of the answer to our question. In my talk I will describe a few of the studies I have been involved in while working with interdisciplinary groups investigating what is going on at the interface between humans and their “tech”. Time permitting, I will try to touch on a range of methods: qualitative, quantitative, self-report, psychometric, physiological, experimental, observational, lab-based, crowdsourced, and in-the-wild; different ways to answer our question, 'What were they thinking?'

Research is Dave’s third career. He came to Heriot-Watt University in September 2010 to study for his MSc in IT Software Systems. In February 2015 Dave completed his PhD on an HWU CDI Theme scholarship here at The School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MACS) in Crowdsourced Intuitive Visual Design Feedback supervised by Mike Chantler (MACS) and Britta Kalkreuter (School of Textiles and Design). Since then he has worked on various projects funded by UKRI/EPSRC and Dstl, including as Experimental Lead for the Human-Robot Interaction theme on the EPSRC ORCA Hub. Dave’s post as Research Fellow in MACS is currently funded by three National Robotarium EPSRC/UKRI research projects: DeMILO (EPSRC Developing Machine Learning-empowered Responsive Manufacture of Industrial Laser Systems), P-I, Richard Carter with Co-I, Mike Chantler, UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Trust, P-I, Thusha Rajendran, and EPSRC HUman-machine teaming for Maritime Environments (HUME), P-I, Ron Petrick.

Language technologies keep being made, but their purposes remain elusive, with their interactions with society seemingly a secondary consideration. In this talk, I focus on this consideration from three perspectives: - Mirages of humanity: How are dialogue systems presented? How do design choices construct illusions of humanity in dialogue systems? - The nature of disagreement: There is an increasing trend to recognise variation in human labelling for NLP tasks, but is all disagreement equal? - NLP and its Futures: If, by engaging with societies, NLP co-constructs futures, what future societies does the research imagine?

Gavin Abercrombie is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University. He is interested in Safety, Fairness & Ethics in NLP, and is Co-Investigator on the EPSRC-funded project Equally Safe Online.

Robots are often argued to occupy a unique ontological category in the human mind, somewhere between artifact and person, somewhere between engineering and science fiction. Yet few roboticists acknowledge the way that robots grew to occupy this niche. In this talk, I will begin by describing robots' cultural origination in the White Patriarchal ambitions in the 19th-century United States. After laying this groundwork, I will then describe several ways that the design and deployment of modern robots continue to reinforce White Patriarchy across multiple domains of power, and the need for roboticists to adopt new tools of responsible design in order to better understand the implications of their design processes -- and ensure that the robots of the future are instead wielded as a force for good.

Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017. Tom’s research focuses on enabling and understanding natural language based human-robot interaction that is sensitive to environmental, cognitive, social, and moral context. His work is funded by grants from NSF, ONR, and ARL, as well as by Early Career awards from NSF, NASA, and AFOSR. Tom is currently on sabbatical at the University of Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where he is writing a book for MIT Press on the social and ethical implications of interactive robots.

Artificial intelligence is now routinely used in numerous research projects involving the study of molecular systems. In this talk, I will present two projects in which I have employed AI-based strategies in innovative ways. First, I will show how a robotics-inspired algorithm was used to predict whether pairs of molecules could form so-called molecular cages. As this algorithm is computationally efficient, it allows screening very large numbers of candidate molecules. Second, I will show how I used machine learning techniques to impute missing data from so-called deep mutational scanning experiments, which allow assessing protein variant effects on extremely large scales. Central to this work is a protein encoder, called ESM (Evolutionary Scale Modelling), initially developed for natural language processing and recently extended to protein sequences.

Didier Devaurs is a cross-disciplinary research fellow (XDF) at the University of Edinburgh. During his PhD (University of Toulouse, France), he developed novel extensions of sampling-based path planning algorithms by creating the concept of optimal path planning in a cost space. As a postdoctoral researcher (Rice University, USA), he developed computational methods for the conformational modelling and analysis of molecular systems. For the past two years (University of Edinburgh), his research has focused on addressing quantitative limitations of deep mutational scanning experiments, with the long-term goal of producing clinical interpretations of protein variants in patients using state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

The Innosuisse project (36691.1 IP-SBM), Implementation of Service Robotics in the Field of Elderly Care (AgeBots), we have investigated over 3 years which robotic systems can support both the elderly and the caregivers in a care home. In order to ensure high-quality care for the elderly despite the shortage of skilled workers, concrete and promising areas of application for service robotics are being tested using an integral and user-centered approach and a new range of services is being introduced to the market.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Katrin S. Lohan is Head of the Institute for the Development of Mechatronic Systems EMS since 2023, and Professor of Robotics and Automation at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences since 2019, as well as Visiting Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Prof. Lohan received her doctorate in Intelligent Systems Engineering from Bielefeld University in 2012 and has more than 10 years of experience in the development of intelligent systems.

Prof. Zeller presents a range of projects in HRI that challenge our traditional concepts of how we should design Human-Robot Interaction research and design. To be able to integrate different dimensions and disciplines, she introduces an extended HRI design and evaluation framework that includes facts, figures but also "softer" social concepts and relevant paradigms.

Frauke Zeller is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction & Creative Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. Her expertise is in HCI, HRI, AI and digital methods. Before joining Edinburgh Napier University in 2023, Dr Zeller was Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada where she has been holding a range of research-related positions, such as director of the Centre for Communicating Knowledge, director of The Creative School Catalyst (a research catalyst and facilitator), director of The Creative School Audience Lab. Dr Zeller has been awarded a wide range of research funding, among them the prestigious Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Fellowship, funded by the European Commission. She was DAAD Research Ambassador for six years, and is still advisory council member of GAIN. Dr Zeller is also the co-creator of Canadan's first hitchhiking robot - hitchBOT. The project garnered broad public interest all around the world, and since then, she has been working on a range of human-robot interaction and AI-related projects.

Perception is a complex process that brings observers to interpret sensory inputs based on their own previous experiences, predictions, and intentions. Even social interaction shapes this process because others are incorporated when they implicitly provide relevant information to the observer. As a result, interaction is supported by jointly perceiving the environment with others, a capability called Shared Perception. If Shared Perception is essential among humans, it is also pivotal to interact with robots. Walking along two of the principal axes of HRI research, the study of humans while interacting with robots and the development of robots to make them interact with humans, this talk will present why, in HRI, it is crucial to think beyond the mere content of perception. Therefore, the first part of the presentation will consist of a theoretical introduction to the concept of Shared Perception. In the second part, I will exhibit some experimental results collected from HRI user studies to show that human perception is a function of previous experience and social interaction. Eventually, I will address the implementation of robotic perceptual abilities to support verbal communication (reception of verbal content) through human non-verbal cues.

Carlo Mazzola is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cognitive Architectures for Collaborative Technologies unit (CONTACT) of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He collaborates in the scientific coordination of the EU-funded twinning project TERAIS. His research area is the development of social skills for human-aware, explainable, and trustworthy humanoid robots. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano (Italy) and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering and Robotics from the University of Genoa and the Italian Institute of Technology with a thesis about Shared Perception in Human-Robot Interaction. While completing his Ph.D., he spent three months as a Visiting Researcher in the Cognitive Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science of the University of Manchester (UK).

We live in a world where we interact with security artefacts everyday, even if we don’t notice it. Every single time we visit a website our browsers are encrypting content on our behalf to keep our communications secure and providing cookies that not only enable staying logged in to the websites but also being tracked on the web. In this talk I will briefly go over research I have been involved with in designing and analysing such artefacts and understanding people’s interactions with them. I will give a few examples of recent work in web tracking, password managers, and WhatsApp ‘security code’ verification and discuss lessons learnt.

Siamak Shahandashti is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in cyber security and privacy at the University of York, UK. Prior to joining York, he has been with other institutions in the UK, France, and Australia. His research interests include applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and usable security and privacy. His recent academic service includes membership of the program committee of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (the leading conference on PETs) and the UK Information Commissioner's Office Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Expert Forum. The impact of his research includes the design of the first verifiable e-voting system trialled in the UK among other industrial and standardisation impacts. Further information can be found on his webpage (cs.york.ac.uk/~siamak).

Interest in the adoption of robot-based support for older adults is growing, even if so far it has received limited adoption in current assistance practices. Humanoid robots can interact through various modalities, which can be useful for creating social and emotional interaction, thus increasing their acceptability and user engagement. Since older adults are a category of users very varied in terms of their preferences, interests, and abilities, it can be useful to propose serious games for cognitive training that are able to personalise exploiting facts and memories from their life, and thus be more relevant for each of them. I will present the approach to personalised serious games for cognitive training with humanoid robots, developed in our group in the CNR SERENI project, and the platform prototype we designed and developed to support them. The discussion will also consider the recent experience carried out in a trial with a group of mild cognitive impairment older adults.

Fabio Paternò is Research Director at the Italian National Research Council, where he leads the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems at the Information Science and Technologies Institute, in Pisa. He has been a principal investigator in several international and national projects, mainly in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. His current research interests are Interactive Smart Spaces, Accessibility, End-User Development, Human-centered Artificial Intelligence, and Humanoid Robots. He is an IFIP Fellow and a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy.

In this talk the speaker will cover recent studies investigating whether a robot’s presented persona influences how people are willing to interact with it. Speaker will also discuss approaches to personalising behaviour for assistive social robots for long-term interaction. Finally, the talk will end with challenges in involving users in designing behaviour for social robots using AI techniques.

Frank Broz is an assistant professor in the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science at TU Delft. He is the Human-Robot Interaction theme lead for the TU Delft Robotics Institute. His research in HRI focuses on socially assistive robotics and especially on nonverbal and embodied aspects of these interactions.

Despite early successes, building self-driving vehicles is clearly a massive long-term challenge. In this talk I will describe our work studying the testing of self driving cars on public roads, in particular, the Tesla ‘FSD beta’, and the Waymo driverless taxi service. We study video recordings of self-driving cars being driven in different cities, looking specifically at how they manage their interactions with other drivers. While the cars featured in these videos can (mostly) navigate the physical environment of the road, it is clear that they still face multiple challenges in communicating with other drivers. The road is a surprisingly social space, and this creates major challenges for self-driving cars to both communicate their actions to others, but also to see how others communicate to them. In particular, self-driving cars often halt suddenly on the road. While these behaviours do not break any traffic rules (and in many cases is the safe thing to do) they break the sequential and temporal expectations of road interaction. Building on this work I will discuss the broader problem of ‘designing robotic motion’ and how interaction researchers and robot designers can work together on some recent challenges in human robot interaction. This work draws on two of my recent papers published at ACM CHI - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3544548.3581045 and the ACM group conference - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567555

Professor Barry Brown is a research professor at the Stockholm University and jointly a professor at the University of Copenhagen, within the HCC group. His work focuses on using video methods to understand ordinary interaction around technology, spanning settings as diverse as the work of food delivery drivers to interactions with mobile phone alarms. He has recently focused on design issues in the area of transport, studying how to design electric scooters, and self-driving vehicles. He previously worked as the research director of the Mobile Life research centre (2011-2017), and as an associate professor in the Department of Communication at UCSD (2007-2011). He has published over 100 papers in human computer interaction and social science forums, and has five ACM best paper nominations (CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp), two ACM best paper awards (CHI) and a 10-year impact award from the Ubicomp conference. His research has widely covered in the international press including the Guardian, Time, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Voice of America and Fortune Magazine.

AI techniques can be used in a variety of ways all throughout the game development process, such as in content creation, game adaptation, automated game balancing, and much more. In this talk, I will provide a summary of where and how AI can be used in game production, and provide two examples of how it has been used in an academic setting to automatically generate musical transitions for computer games, and in an industry setting to create bots for the VR game Blaston.

Dr Simon Cutajar is a Maltese game programmer currently based in Stockholm, Sweden, where he explores novel gameplay and AI techniques in the VR and AR space at Resolution Games. His professional interests include game development, procedural content generation, computational creativity, and artificial intelligence.He holds a PhD from the Open University, obtained in 2020, where he focused on automatically generating musical transitions for computer games. His homepage can be found at https://simon.com.mt.

When humans talk to each other face-to-face, they use their voices, faces, and bodies together in a rich, multimodal, continuous, interactive process. For a robot to participate fully in this sort of natural, face-to-face conversation in the real world, it must also be able not only to understand the social signals of its human partners, but also to produce appropriate signals in response. I will present recent research in this area, and will also discuss the emerging ethical implications of real-world deployment of socially intelligent robots.

Dr Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are human-robot interaction, social robotics, and embodied conversational agents. She recently coordinated the MuMMER project, a European Horizon 2020 project in the area of socially aware human-robot interaction, and is currently coordinating a UK/Canada collaborative project investigating the use of socially intelligent robots in paediatric emergency rooms. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and has previously worked at the Technical University of Munich and Heriot-Watt University. Her homepage is http://maryellenfoster.uk/

Attestation is one of the most critical mechanisms in confidential computing (CC). This talk presents a novel approach based on the combination of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-agnostic attestation architecture and formal analysis enabling comprehensive and rigorous security analysis of attestation mechanisms in CC. We demonstrate the application of our approach for three prominent industrial representatives, namely Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) in architecture lead solutions, Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) in vendor solutions, and Secure CONtainer Environment (SCONE) in frameworks. For each of these solutions, we provide a comprehensive specification of all phases of the attestation mechanism in confidential computing, namely provisioning, initialization, and attestation protocol. Our approach reveals design and security issues in Intel TDX and SCONE attestation.

Speaker Bio: Muhammad Usama Sardar is a Research Associate at TU Dresden working for the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 248 Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems (CPEC) since October 2021. His current research focuses on the formal specification and verification of architecturally-defined remote attestation for confidential computing, specifically Intel SGX, TDX and Arm CCA. He leads the recently accepted formal specification project in CCC Attestation SIG, and contributes to various research networks, such as EuroProofNet (WG3), Open Compute Project (OCP), and Methodes formelles pour la securite. He is also a tutor for the master's courses: Systems Engineering, Principles of Dependable Systems, and Software Fault Tolerance. Talk done joint with Cybersec / LAIV / DSG

Many countries around the world are faced with challenges relating to an increasingly aging population and growing shortage of caregivers to support them. Robots, along with other technology solutions, hold significant promise to fill this gap. However, it has not yet been fully considered how these capabilities could be integrated into the daily lives of professional caregivers and care recipients. In this talk, I will present a research program that seeks to uncover the needs of these two key user groups to understand how assistive robots can be successfully integrated into senior living communities. First, we worked with professional caregivers using ethnographic and co-design methods to identify their workflows and needs from robotic assistance. Second, we developed a novel method called Situated Participatory Design to work with residents of a senior living community to explore how a robot could fit into their day-to-day lives. I will present results from both of these field studies and discuss the complex set of factors that influence how assistive robots need to be personalized to succeed in the complex caregiving ecosystem.